In Honour Bound

by Nina Bawden

  She looked hard at the wall behind his head as if she had just noticed something remarkably absorbing there. He wanted to comfort her but the pale, almost scornful remoteness of her face made him feel shy and discouraged.

  He said, ‘I thought perhaps Johnny would have gone to the hospital.’

  It was the first time either of them had spoken as if Johnny’s absence was worrying. They had behaved as if he was off on some errand known to both of them and was simply a little late in coming home.

  ‘No.’ She stood up, lit a cigarette, inhaled once and threw it, smouldering, into the empty grate.

  ‘What’s the time, Fred?’

  ‘Half past six.’

  ‘Not already?’

  She turned to him quickly. Her frightened eyes acknowledged that there was no point in pretending any more. ‘Fred—where is he? Why doesn’t he come back?’

  He stirred restlessly in his chair and coughed. ‘I don’t know. Would he have gone home—to Fitchet?’

  ‘Not without telling me. I don’t think he would have gone there anyway. Lester was going back tonight.’

  He did not understand her argument. ‘Would that be a reason not to go to Fitchet? Oughtn’t you to get hold of Lester anyway?’

  ‘No,’ she said, with such violence that he jumped. She looked at him and smiled with painful effort. ‘Sorry—I didn’t mean to shout. But I can’t bear the thought of him knowing.’ Her face twisted and she sat down in a chair with her hands pressed tight into her belly. ‘Not just because of what I’ve done, though I suppose that’s part of it, but because to tell him would be like—like admitting that everything has broken down.’ She let out a long, quivering breath. ‘Lester’s found him a job. In an oil company. But even Lester’s family feeling has limits. If this comes out, it’ll be the end of everything.’

  ‘Can you hide it?’ he said, astounded.

  ‘Isn’t it possible? Surely—if the hospital doesn’t go to the police, or that terrible woman upstairs, and if Charles is all right—all that has happened is that Johnny simply lost his temper.…’ Her face was wide-awake suddenly, her eyes appealed to him. He saw she was going through one of her energetic renewals of hope. ‘The main thing, isn’t it, is to find him before he does something utterly silly? He’s quite capable of doing anything—even of giving himself up to the police. He doesn’t know, you see, he may even think …’

  Frederick finished the sentence flatly. ‘That he has killed Charles?’

  He felt coldly distant from her.

  She winced. ‘Don’t. Oh, please Fred. Don’t look so shocked. You think it’s terrible to bother about his job at a time like this, don’t you? I’m sorry. I can’t help it. The only thing I can do is to hope that he comes back, that everything is all right.’ Her voice caught in a husky sob. ‘Fred—where would he go?’

  ‘To walk—get drunk—any one of a hundred things.’

  ‘That’s no help, is it? We want to find him. Can’t you think of anyone—anyone he might go to?’

  He said tiredly, ‘Oakes. He might go to Len Oakes.’

  ‘He couldn’t help him. Why should he go to him?’

  He looked at her, astonished by the flat anger in her voice. ‘Where else could he go? Mary …’ He coughed to clear the harshness from his throat.

  Her face flushed slightly, she made a queer little whimpering sound in her throat. He thought her expression showed that whatever courage she had had was definitely gone. But she said, after a minute, ‘All right. Then we had better find Oakes, hadn’t we?’

  The street was two lines of old, tall houses through which a suddenly cold little wind crept sluggishly, barely disturbing the newspapers in the gutters. It was a silent street, some of the houses were quite empty, their windows boarded up; outside one of them, half on the pavement, there was a derelict Austin Seven. Four wheels were gone, the windscreen bashed in. It looked like an abandoned Dinkey toy.

  ‘They’re coming down,’ Frederick said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The houses. They’re going to build blocks of flats.’

  There was still light in the sky but barely enough in the dying street to see the numbers on the houses. Frederick peered at a door with fumbling, short-sighted nervousness; when he found the strip of cardboard in the line of rusted bells, his face betrayed his reluctance.

  ‘Why don’t you ring?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t think he’ll be there. It was only a stupid idea. I don’t know what to say to him if he is.’

  ‘We can’t just do nothing,’ she bullied him. ‘Are you crazy?’

  He mopped at his forehead and said faintly, ‘I think I’m ill.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake …’ She pushed him away impatiently and rang the bell. There was a faint tinny sound deep inside the house. Nothing happened. She rang again, forcefully, keeping her finger on the bell. This time a window creaked above their heads and a woman’s voice shouted something. They stood back from the house and looked up. The woman’s face was in shadow but her silhouette looked young. She said, ‘Who’s that?’

  Her voice echoed as in a tunnel. It sounded shockingly loud.

  Frederick said hoarsely, ‘Mrs. Oakes?’

  She didn’t answer for a minute. The breeze caught her hair and the strands spiked up momentarily round her face. Then she said, ‘Yes. That’s me. What d’you want?’

  ‘Just a talk, Mrs. Oakes.’ He glanced warningly at Mary. ‘I’m a friend of Len’s.’

  ‘Oh it’s you,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you say so? Half a minute.’

  She withdrew her head, re-appeared, threw a key out of the window. It clanked on the pavement. ‘Come on up.’ She slammed down the window.

  The passage and stairs were evilly dark and smelt of dust and urine and disuse. The house felt empty. There was a nightlight burning on the first landing where part of the banisters had fallen away. Frederick picked it up and climbed upwards, his head and shoulders monstrously shadowed on the flaking distemper of the wall.

  Mary said, ‘Johnny wouldn’t know places like this existed.’

  ‘Even Johnny can learn,’ he said dryly. He stopped and looked down. With the nightlight elevated in his hand and his shadow behind it on the wall, he looked grotesque. ‘What do you know about Len Oakes, Mary?’

  ‘I know that he fell in love with Johnny when they were in prison.’ Disgust rose up in her as she spoke and she tried to crush it down. She said, ‘It—was a terrible shock to Johnny.’

  ‘I believe that.’ Frederick’s voice held a very faint overtone of amusement. Then he sighed. ‘He had a lot of illusions.’

  ‘Don’t talk about him in the past tense,’ she said with quick irritability that arose, she recognized, out of a deep embarrassment.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He stood still, peering downwards. All she could see of him were his glasses, two blind headlamps, and the tufts of his thinning hair outlined by the soft, night-nursery light. Then he took off his glasses and wiped the sweat off the brink of his nose. ‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated with a dry, reflective sadness. ‘I hoped that was something he would never find out.’

  She was touched and ashamed. ‘What an old nanny you are, Fred.’

  He sighed again, replaced his glasses and climbed on, round the bend in the rickety stair.

  ‘Yes. He’s been here,’ Mrs. Oakes said.

  She sat, swinging long legs on the edge of the table that held the remains of the last meal, a fair-sized duck, eaten to the bones, several dirty saucepans, the stale end of a loaf and a half-empty packet of butter.

  Her voice was coarse but soft and agreeable. ‘They had a good meal,’ she said. ‘Young men need a good meal inside them. Duck and potatoes and a good green salad. Nothing out of a tin.’

  ‘Len says you’re a good cook,’ Frederick said.

  She smiled slowly. ‘Anyone can be. Most people don’t bother, that’s all. You only have to take a little trouble. For example, I always cook duck with oranges. It cuts the grease.’
She turned her head towards Mary and smiled beyond her as if she were regarding herself in a mirror. ‘I always follow the recipes in the papers. There’s often something new in the papers. Len likes variety.’

  She wore a dirty mauve and white kimono and the room was filthy in a way that must have taken years to accumulate. She sat in the middle of it, unconcerned, grubby, but beautiful, one milky arm bared as she raised it to push back her hair. She would be fat quite soon but now the bones of her magnificent face were only gently blurred by flesh, the rounded contours, the heavy, sculptured chin of a Roman beauty. She carried her flesh sensuously, touching it as if she loved it. Her eyes were hyacinth blue and bland as a wicked child’s.

  ‘It’s terrible the way some people cook,’ she said. ‘A sin and a shame. Bought meat pies, filleted kippers. I wouldn’t even give them to a dog. I had a dog once—I gave him a pound of meat a day, fresh from the butcher. I didn’t care when he ran away, though. He was only a mongrel. I’d like to get an Alsatian. That’s a good breed.’

  ‘Yes,’ Frederick said. ‘Where have they gone, do you know?’

  She smiled at Mary, caressingly. ‘Is your husband in trouble? I don’t want to do any harm to anyone.’

  ‘You won’t. We just want to know where he’s gone.’

  She got off the table and walked, lazily as a lioness, over to the radio that stood on a bamboo table by the unmade bed. She switched it on. It was between stations; a French voice read the news against a background of fleshy crooning. She picked up the indistinct tune, humming softly, half shutting her eyes. ‘Any friend of Len’s is a friend of mine. I wouldn’t want to get him into trouble.’

  ‘Of course not.’ Frederick coughed in a sudden spasm, muffling his mouth in his scarf.

  ‘That’s nasty,’ Mrs. Oakes said with interest. ‘In the tubes, isn’t it? You ought to learn how to breathe. Last year, Len and I took lessons from an Indian gentleman.’

  Scarlet faced, Frederick smiled at her politely.

  ‘Another thing is to take yeast. Just a little every morning. Brewer’s yeast, not made-up stuff from the chemist. All the goodness is out of it.’

  ‘Please,’ Mary said. ‘Please, Mrs. Oakes. It’s very important. Tell me where my husband is.’

  Mrs. Oakes looked at her with the maudlin intensity some women achieve when drunk, but she wasn’t drunk.

  ‘You won’t get him back like that, dear, I can tell you. It’s just no damn good, running after a man.’

  She spoke with a condescending authority that Mary would have found silly in another woman, but Mrs. Oakes intimidated her. She had that air of cosy self-satisfaction that makes other people examine the insecure foundations of their own assurance: Mary’s confidence broke like glass against it.

  ‘Fred—say something,’ she appealed.

  Mrs. Oakes laughed. ‘It’s no good asking him. What would he know about it?’

  Frederick said quietly, ‘Mr. Prothero is in trouble. We only want to help him. We can’t help him unless we know where he is.’

  ‘What’ll you do if I tell you?’ she said. She narrowed her eyes into sleepily arrogant, blue slits and swayed towards the dirty table, resting one hand stagily on the edge of it and throwing back her head. It was so careful a pose that the temporary awe with which Mary had regarded her crumpled instantly. She was an outdated femme fatale, a devitalized Dietrich, hunching a pale shoulder out of her filthy kimono with a second-hand provocativeness.

  ‘We’ll pay you,’ she said contemptuously.

  Mrs. Oakes turned her back, went to the bamboo table and turned up the radio. The sobbing tune rose to a wailing boom against which the animated foreign voice crackled despairingly. She remained, presenting her back to the room and moving her hips gently in time to the music.

  Frederick said—he must have spoken quite loudly but it sounded a thread of a whisper against the volume of sound in the room—‘It’s no good offering money.’ His eyes glinted with pale humour. ‘Not baldly, anyway. She has her pride, as I daresay she’ll be prepared to tell you. Sentiment’s the line to take—you pull out every throbbing organ stop.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Mary said. ‘She can’t simply refuse to tell us.…’ She had an odd thought that surprised her: if Lester were here, he would know how to deal with this woman.

  ‘Can’t she?’ Frederick had a coughing fit. He spluttered, ‘You go. Wait downstairs. I’ll see if I can get it out of her.’

  When Mary left the room, Mrs. Oakes did not even glance at her. She stood on the doorstep, watching the light die over the rooftops and raging inwardly. Frederick did not keep her long. He came slowly down the stairs, wheezing sharply at each intake of breath. ‘Len’s on the night run to Liverpool,’ he said huskily. ‘Johnny’s with him.’

  ‘Why couldn’t she say so?’ For the moment Mary was no more than sharply irritated.

  ‘A taste for mystery. Allied to self-preservation. If most of the people you know are engaged in some form of criminal activity, it makes you devious.’

  She smiled, amused, and then, as they went into the street, seemed to step into cold, grotesque reality.

  ‘What can we do?’ she cried, clutching Frederick’s arm. ‘Oh Fred—what can we do?’

  He looked at her. He was rosy with fever, and shivering. He said, ‘I wish to hell I knew.’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  ‘I hate myself,’ Mary said. She spoke unemotionally, almost flatly, but her face was white.

  ‘Things are never one person’s fault,’ Frederick murmured. ‘It’s more complicated than that.’

  He lay back in Martin’s bed, sipping hot milk, his face pallid and apologetic above his cotton underwear. He had been too ill to go home and Mary had had to help him out of the taxi and down the stairs to the flat, but he was still ashamed. He was always ashamed, out of humility, when people did things for him.

  ‘This was my fault, wasn’t it?’ She clenched one fist and struck it hard against the end of the bed. ‘Smug, hypocritical bitch,’ she said in the same cold, level tone. ‘I was so damned sure of myself, wasn’t I? I thought—if the old rules don’t fit, you throw them away and make new ones. Sex isn’t wrong, it’s healthy and normal—if your husband doesn’t suit you, go elsewhere. It doesn’t matter, as long as no one gets hurt. But it does matter—it mattered before this happened. You can’t go against what you believe and stay whole. Oh—I can’t look at myself, Fred.’ She flinched, as if the words had stabbed at her physically.

  He said pityingly, ‘It’s not an easy thing, to adjust your conscience.’

  ‘And it doesn’t work, does it? You can use any argument you like but it’s only a trick to get what you want in the end. Once you see that you hate yourself more than if you’d simply done something you knew was wrong.’

  ‘It’s always harder to work out your own rules. If you’re an honest person, that is.’ He looked at her pale, set face and said gently, ‘Don’t blame yourself too much. It’s a kind of pride. No one with any heart would blame you.’

  ‘Oh God—does that matter? I wish they would. I wish everyone would spit at me, throw stones, like they did at that woman in the Bible.’ She gave a shuddering sob and thrust the back of her hand against her mouth.

  ‘Of course you do,’ he said with a brief, tired smile. ‘It makes it easier. If people blame you, you can start defending yourself. But I’m not going to blame you. I opted out of that scheme a long time ago.’

  She was still for a minute, pressing her knuckles hard against her teeth, her eyes watching him with something like terror. Then she said, ‘I’m sorry, Fred. I’m being abominably selfish. You’re ill.…’

  ‘I can still talk. It’s about all I can do,’ he said bitterly.

  ‘There’s nothing anyone can do.’ She relaxed wearily on the bed, her legs drawn up under her. Her weight pulled the bedclothes uncomfortably tight across him. She said, ‘I still don’t really understand. Why it happened, I mean. Johnny knew I’d been unfaithful t
o him, though he didn’t know who the man was. And he didn’t seem to mind much. That isn’t just a careful little assessment to put me in the clear. He wasn’t jealous—he didn’t blame me, Fred.’

  ‘He wouldn’t blame you because you’re a woman,’ he said. ‘That’s partly chivalry—the weaker vessel and all that—and partly because women don’t count with him. Morally, I mean, not sexually. He wouldn’t expect a woman, even his wife, to be loyal in the way he’d expect a man to be. He wouldn’t, even, have lost his temper with Charles if he’d been a stranger. Charles was his friend. That outraged him.’ The colour crept up under his freckled skin. ‘He loathed disloyalty.’

  ‘It sounds so schoolboyish,’ she said uncomfortably.

  ‘There are worse codes.’

  ‘As long as you don’t expect other people to stick to it. He was bound to get hurt, wasn’t he, if he believed that Julian, for example, was still the honourable captain of the first eleven?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t he believe that? He hadn’t changed, you see?’

  She said dully, ‘No. Johnny wouldn’t seduce his best friend’s wife. But the temptation was hardly there, was it?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mary.’ Frederick’s mouth quivered very slightly and an isolated, pale tear crept onto his cheek. ‘Look—let’s leave this, shall we? Just say he had bad luck with his friends.’

  ‘Let’s hope Len Oakes doesn’t let him down too,’ she said savagely. ‘For God’s sake, Fred—do we have to go on talking about Johnny as if he was a good, clean-handed stickler for the Queensberry rules who’s been manhandled by a gang of dirty fighters?’

  She was beginning to sound hysterical. He said gently, ‘It’s true in a way, isn’t it? He’s a good man. That’s partly his background, if you like—he’s never had to learn to be wary. And good men are often at a disadvantage.’

  He spoke with a kind of weary stubbornness that showed the strength of his illusion, the depth of his love. She was touched and then suddenly angry; his faith seemed to reproach her. She said, ‘He’s not so perfect. Maybe he lost his temper because Charles was his friend. But the thing that triggered it off, that finally tipped him over the edge was that Charles was a Jew. Oh—that’s not something he’d admit to in the ordinary way, he has himself on too tight a rein. But when he got angry, he screamed it out. It was grotesque, horrible.…’