by MARY HOCKING
‘If you are quick about it. I see Mr. Quinton making his way towards me.’
‘I wonder if you would mind running over to my flat? I’ve left some papers there that I need. Heffernan wants to have a talk with me before he goes back to London.’
‘You’d like me to go now, would you?’
‘If you don’t mind.’
She consented willingly enough, but without that bubbling air of being glad to be of service which he had at one time found irritating. He explained where she would find the papers. ‘There’s one other thing. Could you come to the office tomorrow? I’ll have a lot to do after this talk with Heffernan.’
‘When will you be there?’ she asked.
‘Not until the afternoon, I’ve got a meeting in the morning. But if you could help Rodney. . . .’
‘I’ll come in the afternoon. What time will you be there?’
‘Really, Hannah, you’re not still. . . .’
‘Two o’clock?’
‘I shall be there at half-past one,’ he snapped. ‘I don’t suppose I’ll have time for lunch.’
‘I’ll be there at two.’
‘You disobliging bitch!’ Although he did not say this aloud, he felt as though he had shouted it at her and was surprised that she did not respond; he turned uneasily to see whether anyone was standing near by. There was only Quinton, who was making some kind of signal to Bakewell. Moray watched Hannah walk towards the door; under his breath he muttered every filthy term of abuse he had ever heard spoken of womankind. Other people were moving towards the door now. Some of them stopped to exchange a few words with him. As he answered, he was afraid that something obscene would slip out instead of the expected civil banalities.
The room was almost empty. Cope was shepherding Bake – well and Gray towards the door, collecting a few other stragglers on the way. Heffernan was standing by the window with his secretary and Lomax.
‘She may like your paper, but I can’t say I’m impressed. Lacks any spark. Ideas are narrow, provincial, no vision. And the writing is just that bit dull. All right for maiden ladies, I daresay.’ He was talking loudly; this was the kind of offensiveness which is intended for public display. The secretary, standing a little to one side, stared at Lomax, forehead creased and eyes narrowed in distress at what was happening to him. Her attitude had the effect of reinforcing Heffernan’s attack; it was as though she was gently insisting, ‘You do realise, don’t you, how badly you are being mauled?’
‘A few home truths won’t do that little bugger any harm,’ Bakewell said.
‘He looks a bit under the weather,’ Cray observed. They passed through the door together.
Heffernan said, ‘To really succeed with a newspaper you’ve got to have attack, a certain toughness. . . .’
Lomax said, ‘Is that why you have taken away your advertising?’
‘Advertising! I don’t need to advertise. What the devil do you mean by that?’
Lomax closed his eyes and tried to think what he had meant. Heffernan turned to his secretary and said, ‘The man’s drunk.’ He looked at her angrily, as though she was responsible for this.
Moray, who had overheard this exchange, said to Cope, ‘What does he mean about the advertising?’
‘Nothing. He’s a bit drunk by the look of him.’
‘But he must have meant something.’
Cope said, ‘You worry too much. I think I’ll push off now. The blasted English drizzle wakes the fever in my bones. And anyway, Heffernan will expect to talk to you on your own.’
‘I don’t care what he expects. I want you to be there.’
But Cope had already gone.
It was ten minutes later that Lomax came down to the car park. He walked to his car as though treading a tight-rope and then leant against it, his head down. He was sweating, but felt very cold. After a moment, he tried to pull himself upright, but this produced a wave of dizziness and he had the greatest difficulty in keeping on his feet. Like many men who are not physically strong, he was reluctant to give way to weakness and believed that will¬ power is sufficient to conquer most temporary indispositions and many more serious disorders as well. This particular indisposition did not appear to be responding very well to the dictates of will; and had not Rodney Cope appeared beside him at this moment, he would probably have had to sit on the ground. ‘Which would have been unpleasant,’ he said cheerfully to Cope, imagining the intention had already been stated, ‘seeing how much water has collected.’
Cope said, ‘Let’s have your car keys.’
He eased Lomax into the passenger seat, from which he then flopped out, like a Jack-in-the-Box which has lost its spring. ‘I shall be all right,’ he assured Cope unconvincingly as he was again propped into an upright position.
‘Nonsense! I’m going to drive you home.’
‘I might be sick,’ Lomax fretted. ‘So unpleasant for you . . . please don’t. . . .’
Cope righted him once again and slammed the door. He walked round the back of the car, glancing about him as he did so. The rain was heavy and the car park was deserted. He opened the door and got into the driver’s seat. ‘Now, which is the reverse . . . ah, I see. . . .’
Lomax said, ‘So very sorry about this.’
The few people walking along the promenade had their heads bent to avoid the driving rain.
Lomax was still apologising faintly when they stopped. He squinted out of the window and saw hills, and far below, down a green slope, a coastguard’s cottage and the sea beyond . . . at least, this is what he would have seen had he felt better, but in fact it is doubtful whether he saw anything at all. When Cope opened the driver’s door, Lomax moaned gratefully as the damp air cooled his face.
‘We’ll move you over,’ Cope said, and he did this quite gently. Lomax, who hated being a nuisance to anyone, did his best to be helpful. When he was in position, he muttered, ‘Thank you so much. Leave me now, I shall be all right.’ He rested his head against the driving wheel. Cope raised his head and put a bottle to his lips. At this, Lomax showed signs of protest, but this time Cope was firm rather than gentle. ‘Come along, drink, it will do you good. . . . Oh yes, it will!’ He forced Lomax’s head back. ‘Come on, you can take some more. . .’ When he was satisfied, he put the bottle in his pocket. Then he took a duster from the side-pocket of the car and wiped it carefully over the seat, doors, the keys, and the driving wheel; he held the duster in his hands as he started the engine and released the hand brake. The car, which was on an incline, began to move slowly forward. Cope shut the door, still holding the duster.
It was eight o’clock, the visibility was poor, but it was not yet dark and the rain had stopped; some insatiable dog-walkers might still be abroad. In any case, the main point of the exercise was to discredit Lomax, and as he did not dislike the man he was content to leave it to fate to decide whether he should be killed or convicted for driving under the influence of drink. So he did not wait to see what happened to the car after it passed out of his line of vision. Nor did he subsequently give much thought to the incident; his mind darted from one point to another leaving no time for reflection on past events.
What happened, in fact, was not as dramatic as he might have envisaged since the car, now bumping along at a fair speed, first hit a hedge which surrounded a disused concrete gun-emplacement and then rammed the concrete itself. At the impact with the hedge, the door swung open and Lomax was thrown out, which meant that he cut his head and did very painful damage to his right shoulder. The front of the car was so badly buckled, however, that there was no doubt that had he remained at the wheel he would have been seriously injured. Shock and pain brought him back to consciousness and for a few moments he imagined that he was dying. ‘If I’m dying, there’s not much I can do about it,’ he thought. ‘Whereas if I’m not dying, there is a lot I ought to be doing.’ This led him to the conviction that he should attempt a few simple movements designed to discover how much of him was broken. It was quite obvious, wi
thout moving at all, that something was badly wrong with his right shoulder, but a series of careful jerks and wriggles led him to the hopeful conclusion that elsewhere he was only bruised. There was his head, of course: if he had fractured his skull it was important not to move. After a little cautious prodding, he decided he would have to assume he had not fractured his skull. This examination had been exhausting, and for a few minutes he lay staring through the large rent in the hedge which the car had made. Gulls wheeled overhead, but that did not mean anything, because they often came quite far inland; ahead of him, however, the ground rose steeply to a ridge which had the appearance of having been amateurishly snipped all along the edge with giant pinking scissors, frayed edges of chalk were visible. He was somewhere on the Seven Sisters stretch of coastline. There would be a farm, a coastguard’s cottage, something, it didn’t matter what, the important thing was to have an objective.
He had always maintained that until the time comes for us to die, there is always going to be a way to live. On a less dramatic level, during his many walks on downs and fells, he had argued, to the irritation of various companions, that however incapacitated one might be by a fall it would be possible to drag oneself to safety. Now seemed a good time to put these theories to the test. He raised himself gingerly on his undamaged arm and tried to sit up; immediately, the sky wheeled over and the hills came down on top of him. It was apparent that there could be no question of attempting to walk, some kind of crawl stroke using only one arm seemed to be the answer. He started towards the gap in the hedge. The pain in his shoulder was intense. He soon realised that compromise would be needed-such as a short crawl and a long rest. It took him five combined crawl-and-rest periods to get through the gap in the hedge. But really, he told himself as he lay sobbing in a clump of wet ferns, he was remarkably fortunate in that he knew where he was and where he was going. The coastguard’s house, which he saw clearly now, was only half-a-mile away. He moved towards it feeling like a wounded caterpillar. After what seemed like an hour, but was probably only ten minutes, the coastguard’s house had not moved appreciably nearer. He must look on this as a long-term project, he decided as he rested, shivering and sick. ‘You have had a remarkably fortunate life,’ he reminded himself severely. ‘This is the first time you have ever had to put up with such agonising pain; think of what people suffer in war, prison, car accidents, incurable disease. . . .’ At this point, he fainted. When he came to, he decided to substitute encouragement for severity. ‘Tomorrow, you will be laughing about this and boring anyone who will listen to you with the recounting of your exploits. . . .’ Mental effort was too exhausting. He crawled: thought blanked out. When he was actually crawling, it wasn’t so bad because the pain took over and he became a tongue of fire curling on the grass. It was only when faintness made it necessary to rest, which was increasingly often, that he became a human person with limited resources and failing strength inching his way across a vast continent. The coastguard’s house was becoming more and more like a mirage: he lay with his face in the grass and did not look at it when he rested. He told himself he would not look at it for what he judged to be half an hour, by which time he might be pleasantly surprised.
In fact, he was surprised after twenty minutes. It was then that he found another face very close to his, large, deeply furrowed with worry, and canine. It was a wise creature and stood at some distance from him after the first shock of encounter. Then it put its noble head back and barked; it had a deep, imperative bark, the bark of a dog who is accustomed to note being taken of its utterances. Lomax closed his eyes and left the rest to the dog.
After a time, a man came up and said, ‘What have you got there, Samson?’ and Samson proudly displayed his find.
Chapter Twenty
It soon became apparent that the constable by his bedside was not primarily concerned with his welfare. At first, when he woke to the hospital’s more strident version of the dawn chorus, Lomax was not interested in the constable. He felt very ill and seemed to have lost the tenacity which had carried him through the misadventures of the previous evening. Clarity of thought and feeling had blurred. He had escaped from hell into limbo: hell was preferable. In spite of the dawn chorus, he drifted away from the hospital on an abortive journey which he had been making all through the night: he was journeying on the four sides of a square which he could see drawn quite clearly on a sheet of paper; as he journeyed, he kept muttering a formula of which he was very much aware although he could not translate it into words in the normal way. From time to time he jerked close to consciousness, and on each occasion the formula was still there, agitating his mind more than ever, but before it could issue forth in words, he drifted off again and began his journey down one side of the square.
This process of alternate journeying and hovering close to consciousness continued until about ten in the morning, by which time the near-conscious periods occurred so often that he never got beyond a right angle turn of his square. At a quarter past ten he opened his eyes and said clearly to the constable, ‘Hannah Mason. Must find Hannah Mason.’ The constable was not impressed. Persuasion would be necessary. Lomax had neither the strength nor the time to be persuasive; he said to the constable, ‘I must talk to Braithwaite. I won’t talk to anyone else.’
The constable appeared to be under the impression that he wished to see his solicitor.
‘Where am I?’ Lomax asked.
The constable told him he was in hospital.
‘In what town?’
‘Eastbourne.’
‘Eastbourne!’ Scotney seemed as far away as China and as inaccessible as Patagonia. He could have cried with weakness and despair; but as this would achieve nothing, he lay quietly trying to compose as lurid a piece of journalism as he had ever deplored. ‘Mass murder in Scotney, homicidal lunatic at large. Inspector Braithwaite in charge of case.’ The constable’s countenance remained unperturbed. It was just as Lomax had always contended, people had learnt to live with sensationalism just as germs learn to adapt to antibiotics. He said, ‘The chief constable is a friend of mine. If you don’t get Inspector Braithwaite from Scotney at once I shouldn’t fancy your chances of promotion.’
The constable was prepared to gamble on mass murder, but not on his promotion chances. He left the room immediately. His place was taken by a cheerful ginger-haired nurse who smiled at Lomax as though she was on his side whatever he had done. Lomax hoped the constable had gone to find Braithwaite and not to verify his statement with regard to the chief constable with whom he had never enjoyed a harmonious relationship let alone friendship.
‘What am I suffering from?’ he asked the nurse. There was bound to be an interval before he could speak to Braithwaite; it was important to make use of this time.
The nurse told him he had a broken arm, abrasions to head and ribs, and was suffering from shock.
‘Well, that’s not much, is it?’ he said.
She giggled: she was very young.
‘I’m sure you’ve got a lot else to do besides sitting with me,’ he suggested.
She became uneasy. He did not want to get her into trouble, and doubted whether he had the energy to do so.
‘Could you get someone to make a telephone call to The Scotney Gazette?’ he appealed, and lied ‘We go to press today.’
She agreed to arrange for a message to be sent, the communications media having made her aware of the vital importance of deadlines. Lomax hoped that either Allinson or Todd would come quickly and would have the sense to bring clothes.
He must get to Hannah. ‘Act,’ he said to himself. ‘Act, now!’ He got up and sat on the edge of the bed while the ceiling dipped like the veering wing of an aeroplane. ‘Act,’ he said to himself. ‘Do something, anything. . . .’ When the ceiling had righted itself, he got to his feet and began to walk round the bed; waves of nausea alternated with faintness but he fought these back by resolutely concentrating his mind on The Ballad of East and West which was the longest poem he knew. The
pain in his arm was bad, but did not present a problem since it did not incapacitate him. He walked round the bed several times and then had a rest; then he walked round the bed again. He was beginning to get the trick of walking – if Braithwaite didn’t come to him, then he would be able to go to Braithwaite. Something must have delayed the nurse. He had twenty minutes bed-walking before the constable returned. He started The Ballad of East and West for the third time and had reached the Tongue of Jagai by the time the constable came into the room.
‘What do you think you are doing?’ the constable demanded.
Lomax said, ‘ “There was rock to the left and rock to the right, and low lean thorn between/And thrice he heard a breech-bolt snick tho’ never a man was seen. . . .” ’
The constable departed in search of the nurse.
Lomax went on walking round the bed. He was saying, ‘ “ ‘ ’Twas only by favour of mine,’ quoth he, ‘ye rode so long alive. . . .’ ” ’ when he heard angry voices in the corridor. Allinson and Todd had arrived. Allinson was very effective, Lomax had never realised that this large, placid man could be so unpleasant; thanks to his hectoring of the constable, Lomax learnt that he had had his ‘accident’ while driving his car under the influence of drink.
‘Knocked back two tomato juices, had he?’ Allinson asked. ‘Now, listen carefully. . . .’
Lomax said, ‘ “If there should follow a thousand swords to carry my bones away. . . .” ’ He wondered how much time had been wasted by now; but he must not think of time, it was an enemy and would undermine resolution. ‘ “The thatch of thy byres will serve their fires when all the cattle are slain. . . .” ’