by Nina Bawden
She talked on as the train moved reluctantly out of the station. Once launched over the hump of her initial nervousness, Clara was often garrulous but it was usually the garrulousness of nerves. Tonight it was different. She was discovering Julian with the enthusiasm with which an adolescent discovers a new dimension, in mathematics or the movements of the stars. It was precisely that kind of excitement: new doors were opening, she was amazed by the light that poured in.
‘Julian says his basic insecurity probably goes back to his childhood,’ she said proudly.
Johnny laughed. ‘I should think old Julian is as basically secure as the rest of us by now. If not more so. Take it all with a drum of salt, dear. It’s just a pose to arouse your mother-hen instincts.’
Incapable of posing, he rubbed at the steamy window though he could have seen nothing real in the saffron, soupy world outside except an occasional yellow station lamp, blurred with fog. ‘I wonder where we are.’ He fumbled with his coat to get at his hunter. ‘The train’s damn late.’
The train stopped, started in a series of jolts and stopped again. There was a hiss of steam. Pulling down the window and letting in a bellying sail of fog, Johnny announced they were at a station. ‘Though God knows where,’ he said, slamming it shut and shivering.
Outside, porters shouted and trolleys rumbled. The door opened and a couple got in, a fat, middle-aged woman and a thin man with a face like a pale whippet under his trilby hat. The woman sat down, lifted her musquash coat behind her and crossed thick ankles in elastic stockings. She took off her leather gloves, smoothed them carefully on her lap and then coughed a little, her fingers to her mouth. The man cleared his throat and stared at an advertisement for fire insurance. The woman coughed again, that nervous little cough behind her hand. Neither of them looked at the three on the opposite bench but they exuded an atmosphere of furtive enmity as if they had always waited for this train at the same time, on the same spot on the platform, and had expected their usual empty carriage.
The train began to move, the station lights flew backwards like a string of jewels. The door wrenched open and a man scrambled in, stumbling over their feet. Johnny caught his arm to steady him and closed the door. The man smiled his thanks, a wide, shy grin, and swung a heavy tool bag onto the rack. He wore overalls and was tall, with slim hips and a youngish, polished, negroid face. He sat down in the corner seat opposite Johnny and next to the woman in the musquash coat and brought out a Woodbine from his pocket. He smoked reflectively, leaning forward and flicking the ash on the floor between his feet. Beside him, the woman wriggled her shoulders and gave a sharp little sigh. She glanced at her husband and sighed again. Finally she said, ‘If you don’t mind. This is a non-smoking carriage.’ Her skin reddened, her eyes flickered at the Protheros with a defiant angry look.
‘Sorry,’ the Jamaican said. He dropped the butt and ground it under his boot.
They sat in silence. The points switched and they joggled against each other’s shoulders as the train jerked from one set of rails to another. The woman sat, her lips moving silently. Her husband was half asleep, his head bouncing uncomfortably against the back of the seat, his jaw drooping. The Jamaican stared at his reflection in the window. Once his hand went to his breast pocket then he sighed and withdrew it.
‘Where was that?’ Johnny said as they crawled through a station.
‘I can’t see.’ On the far side of the carriage Clara rubbed uselessly at the glass and saw nothing but her own face.
‘Fog’s getting thicker,’ Johnny said.
The train went into a tunnel—it must have been a tunnel because the electric sparks flew along close to the windows. The lights dimmed, the carriage became a small, closed world, they were very conscious of the airlessness and the heat. Then the lights went out altogether.
It was a few minutes later that the woman screamed. A high, outrageous, ripping scream like a gull.
‘Edna,’ her husband said. ‘Edna …’
‘Pull the cord,’ she shouted and went on screaming. Clara clutched Mary’s arm. ‘For God’s sake … Johnny …’
‘Hang on. I’ve got my torch,’ he said.
It was a slim torch, shaped like a fountain pen. Martin had given it to him on his last birthday. It shot a narrow beam across the carriage and showed up the woman’s face like a detail from some surrealist nightmare. Her eyes were open, her mauve lips were open and screaming.
‘Edna,’ her husband said in a thin voice of anguished irritation. ‘Edna. Control yourself.’
At that moment the lights came on and woman was cruelly revealed, half lying along the seat, her musquash coat open, her blouse torn, her skirt rumpled as high as the elastic legs of her peach directoire knickers. She said between high, gull’s cries, ‘He touched me, the dirty nigger, attacked me, look at my blouse. Pull the cord, pull the cord, pull the cord.’
The screeched reiteration was horrifyingly funny. Clara snorted with frightened laughter, her shocked hands to her face.
The woman pulled herself upright, tugged feebly at her skirt. Her screams quietened to long, shuddering moans, her eyes closed.
Her husband rose, the putty of his skin vanishing beneath a wave of darkness, the tendons rigid in his skinny neck. ‘You filth.’ He stood swaying, his eyes small and intensely bright.
‘I didn’t touch her,’ the Jamaican said. He was sitting quite still in his corner, his hands on his knees. They looked at his hands, they couldn’t help it. ‘I didn’t touch her,’ he repeated. His eyes rolled helplessly, full of an uncomprehending and brutal fear like an animal’s when you raise a stick.
‘The woman’s ill,’ Clara said, white as chalk. ‘I’ll get some water.’ She looked round the carriage as if looking for a bell push.
‘Water won’t help,’ the man said. ‘We want more than water.’ He pointed at the Jamaican with a shaking, knobbly hand. ‘You … get out. Get out.’
The Jamaican bounded up, showing the panic stricken whites of his eyes.
‘Don’t be a fool,’ Johnny said sharply, seizing the Jamaican’s arm and forcing him back into the seat. The black face looked at him fearfully. ‘This is madness,’ Johnny said.
He picked up the Jamaican’s hand. ‘Look.’ The pink palm, streaked with black grease, lay in his white one, the fingers limply curled. ‘There would be oil on your wife’s blouse.’
They looked at her guiltily. She was unmarked. She grabbed the edges of her fur coat and tried to pull them together.
‘So you’re calling my wife a liar,’ the husband said. The words were truculent, but he looked uncertain and his voice was almost conciliatory, he ‘didn’t want trouble’.
‘I think she must have been mistaken.’ Johnny’s tone was quietly confident. ‘As my sister says—she’s ill, hysterical.’
The woman gave a loud, abandoned cry. ‘You fool … can’t you see, haven’t you got eyes?’ She rose from her seat. ‘They’re all just waiting for the chance … dirty filth … filthy animals.…’ She lurched suddenly towards Johnny, screaming and spitting. He moved back instinctively and then tapped her on the cheek, lightly and contemptuously. She was still for a moment, mouth open and then she burst into a passion of wild, childish weeping, tears spurting horizontally from the corners of her eyes. She collapsed noisily on the seat, a huddle of cheap fur, pitiful and ugly. Clara made a compassionate noise in her throat and went to her, a protective arm round her shoulders.
‘How dare you,’ the husband yelled. His eyes were suddenly excited. ‘How dare you lay hands on her.’
Head down, he rushed blindly at Johnny, arms ineffectually flailing. With his back against the door, Johnny held him off by the shoulders like an adult with an angry, kicking child. They struggled as if in play, swaying backwards and forwards, a mock fight with feigned anger and soft, glancing blows, Johnny twisting his face sideways out of reach with a little, grim, controlled smile.
The train had stopped though none of them had been aware of it. The door opene
d onto the station platform and men surged in, an impossible number, it seemed, in that narrow space. Mary scrambled onto the bench away from the trampling feet and saw the man, caught from the elbows from behind, spit in Johnny’s face. For a moment Johnny still smiled, his tight little smile and then in a second, distaste was turned into violence; he swung back his fist and smashed it into the man’s jaw.
‘Here, that’s enough,’ someone said. They closed on him, shouting. The door into the corridor was torn open and he fell backwards but struggled up again, wrestling against hands that pinioned his arms behind his back.
Somehow they all got onto the platform, the woman screeching again and draped over the arm of a man in uniform like an old coat in a sale. Her little husband crouched on a seat in front of the Ladies’Waiting-Room, moaning and clutching his jaw.
The fog was very thick, there were about eight men on the platform, station staff and passengers. The woman had begun to scream again. Mary found herself hemmed in against the wall of the waiting-room by a huge porter with a back like the side of a cliff. She pushed past him to get to Johnny. Someone had given him his hat and briefcase. He looked perfectly composed except for a cut on his forehead that was bleeding into his left eye. He was fumbling for his handkerchief, the briefcase tucked under his armpit. The stationmaster was holding his other arm. Johnny was talking to him in a quiet, man-to-man way. ‘… simply ridiculous … unfounded accusations … out of her mind.’
‘The police will want statements when they come,’ the stationmaster said.
Someone said, ‘There he is.’
The Jamaican was standing at the door of the carriage, silhouetted against the light, his bag of tools in his hand. As faces turned towards him, he jumped down and began to run, leaping over a trolley piled high with lumpy mail bags. He caught his foot, fell, got up, but they were all after him, the big porter in the lead and Johnny just behind him. The porter raised his arm and hit his quarry on the back of his neck, with the side of his hand, like a farmer killing a rabbit.
The fog made everything unreal, it was like watching a shadow play. The Jamaican fell behind the trolley, there were shouts, Johnny hit out wildly at the porter who closed with him. They tottered and fell, Johnny underneath, and the others surrounded them, yelling, waving their arms. Terrified, Mary began to run towards them but Clara caught her arm. ‘Don’t be a fool—you’ll only get hurt. You can’t do anything.’
Still holding Mary’s arm—she was much the stronger—she propelled her into the stationmaster’s office where there was a bright, unshaded light and a dancing fire. The woman was lying on a broken-down leather couch, her head on a rolled up coat. She was quiet, her eyes were shut, she might even have been asleep.
Mary said, ‘We can’t just stay here.’
‘What else can we do?’ Clara looked tired to death, her eyes glittered with tears. The stationmaster came in, a red, leathery-faced man with dark eyes in deep sockets. ‘Take a seat, ladies,’ he said. Clara laughed nervously.
The men followed him, the porter rubbing his arm above the elbow and Johnny held fast by a couple of men in raincoats, cut about the face, pale, passionately angry. He was pushed against the wall. They let him go, his arms were free, but he stood upright against a notice board as if bound to it with chains.
‘This is disgraceful,’ he said in a clear voice. It was clear that his confidence was unimpaired. He was still perfectly sure of the ultimate effect of his presence, of his authoritative, top dog voice. He threw a burning glance at the porter. ‘You might have killed that man.’
There was a low, angry murmur. ‘Good riddance,’ someone said.
‘That’s enough,’ the stationmaster said. ‘That’s enough, now.’
‘Rape’s enough.’ The voice came from the back of the bunch of men crowded in the doorway.
‘You’ve no right to say that,’ Johnny said.
‘You’ve no right to say it’s a lie.’
The stationmaster said to Johnny, ‘Be quiet. You’ve done enough, haven’t you?’
‘Interfering bugger,’ the porter said.
Raging, Johnny moved from the wall. ‘I refuse to stay here. I shall go to the police station and make a statement. And I shall advise my solicitor to take what action he thinks fit. On my behalf, and on behalf of that unfortunate man.’ He glanced at his wife and his sister. ‘Mary, Clara …’
There was a slow, determined closing of the ranks before the door. Expressions were dogged, sullen, belligerent. ‘You’ll stay where you are, if you please,’ said the station-master, glowering with the heaviness of small authority. ‘And no more trouble.’
Johnny looked about him, breathing hard, furious at this indignity, quite unable to believe, Mary saw, that something was happening to him that had never happened before. He was in the right, he knew it, but there was no sympathy for him, they were all against him. Nothing he had been taught had any force here, he was quite unprepared. Eventually, of course, the law would come and take over, but the law was what helped or restrained other men—he had never needed to lean on the law. He had had his own defences, his belief in reasonableness and straightness and in personal authority. Now he saw those defences were useless. He stood, straight and tall, pride stretching the skin taut over his narrow bones. Only his eyes, dark with pain and shock, betrayed that all the values he trusted in had suddenly exploded in his face.
There were to be no police charges. In the bleak lights of the station, faced with a tired, patient Inspector, the little man with the whippet face stammered and blustered and finally maintained that his wife was ill. She had been in hospital with what he delicately called a woman’s complaint; they had been on their way to the coast where she was to convalesce with her sister. By the end, he was pleading. There was no need, was there, to upset his wife with the publicity of a police court? The Inspector wearily agreed. And there was no more to it, was there? The whole thing, apart from the false accusation of assault, had been no more than a stupid brawl. No one had been really hurt except the Jamaican, in bed at the local hospital, and it was up to him to bring a civil case if he wanted to.
‘I shall advise him to do so,’ Johnny said. He was so intent on vengeance that he could almost have wished the man’s injury to be more dramatic. They visited him at the hospital where he was in a side ward with mild concussion. He was asleep. There was nothing they could do except leave their name, address, and instructions to get in touch with them or their solicitor.
‘In fact, I shall insist that he takes action,’ Johnny said as the young doctor in Casualty washed the blood from his face and put a dressing on the wound above his eye.
‘I doubt if he will,’ the doctor said, grinning suddenly. He was a pleasant young man with a crumpled, impish face and the flat, lazy vowels of East London. He had heard the whole story and relished it as a break in the routine of motor accidents and suicides. ‘He’s not the type.’
‘He must be made to,’ Johnny said strongly, his mouth pinched tight. He was unable to profit by humiliation; someone else must be made to pay for it. ‘If it’s a matter of money,’ he went on, ‘then I shall offer to foot the bill myself.’
‘Money’s part of it,’ the doctor said. ‘But not all. It’s a habit of mind. I daresay he wouldn’t see the law as being on his side.’
‘But how dreadful,’ Clara cried, pale and intent. ‘The poor man—what will he think? He’s been horribly insulted, injured, and none of it his fault. What will he think if no one lifts a hand to put it right?’
The doctor dried his hands and looked at her with a touch of pity. ‘No more and no less than he thought before. In fact he’ll probably be glad he’s got off so lightly. If I were you, I should sleep on it. Be angry if you like. It’s a good medicine.’ He looked at Johnny critically. ‘I think the cut will do. Get your own doctor to have a look at it in a day or so.’
Clara said indignantly, ‘I don’t know how you can take it so calmly. My brother’s been hurt and an innocent man—
and all you can say is that we should sleep on it. How could we? It’s so irresponsible.’
The doctor smiled. ‘You can’t be responsible for everyone,’ he said.
They thought they could, of course. Mary saw that they were both raging with the fine, splendid indignation of a class that had received more than justice for so long that they could demand it, without hypocrisy, for all men. The vast hopelessness, the humility, of the majority of people filled them with pride, not panic. They had been bred to take the reins and act as guides along the path of truth and justice. It was stimulating to see themselves, even temporarily, in their hereditary role: in the taxi they hired to take them home to Fitchet, their spirits rose, they spoke with one voice.
‘That dreadful woman.’
‘That fearful little squirt of a man.’
‘They mustn’t be allowed to get away with it.’
‘What sort of idea would the poor devil have of British Justice?’
‘Nothing could make up for it, of course, but at least he can be compensated.’
‘I shall speak to Rudge in the morning.’
Clara giggled suddenly. She had a habit of giggling in the middle of the most solemn discussions like an embarrassed girl. ‘I’m looking forward to seeing Lester’s face when you tell him.’
‘I tell you what he’ll say. He’ll say, after all, there were no bones broken.’
Clara frowned. ‘I wonder if he’ll take it seriously. He would—if the man had been an Englishman.’
‘In that case,’ Johnny said in a decisive voice, ‘I shall tell him that I am about to be prosecuted for rape.’
‘In a third-class carriage.’
For a moment they both laughed.
Johnny said, ‘It might be a good idea if I suggested to Rudge that he should go to see the man at the hospital. Once he’s discharged, we might lose track of him.’
Mary had listened to them, half amused, half irritated. She said, ‘You can’t possibly do anything of the sort. You heard what the doctor said. It’s true. The man won’t want to do anything. You can’t force people to do things because you think they ought to. It’s not your business. If you interfere, you’ll only make things worse for him.’