by Nina Bawden
He touched her cheek gently with the tips of hot fingers. ‘That’s not important, you know that. It was just a handy brick to throw. Everyone has primitive impulses, even Johnny. I never said he was a saint. If he has prejudices, he can’t help them, no one can. The best any man can ever do is to be ashamed of them, not to let them count. And you know that he never would in the ordinary way. Only he was terribly provoked.’
‘I know that,’ she said painfully. ‘I’m sorry, Fred. I didn’t mean it. I suppose I was trying to defend Charles—or myself.’
‘You don’t have to defend Charles. He doesn’t need it. And I wasn’t attacking him. I just think that in the ordinary way he’s perfectly capable of looking after himself. He’s got his own defences.’
‘And Johnny hasn’t?’
‘No.’ He smiled, though there were deep lines of anxiety round his mouth and eyes. ‘He’s wide open. Someone like Charles, you see, knows that in order to live you’ve got to be clever and complex and wade through a lot of muck—though because he‘s a decent sort of man he’ll hold his nose and keep his boots as clean as he can. Johnny might know this intellectually but he’ll never believe it emotionally. He’ll never forgive himself for what he’s done, he won’t even try to explain it away as most of us would have to do sooner or later if life was to be tolerable at all. He’ll live with his guilt until his dying day.’
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘I can’t bear any more.’
‘I’m sorry, dear.’ He lay back, his face ashen suddenly, his eyes closed.
She said, ‘What will happen to him, Fred? He’s run away—I suppose for the first time in his life.’
‘I wish to God I knew.’ It sounded like a prayer.
‘But you must know,’ she cried frantically. ‘You know what the legal position is, don’t you? Can they prosecute him? Charles will say it was an accident.…’ She thought: as long as he lives. It was something she could not say.
‘You know that’s not the important thing,’ Frederick said.
He fell asleep almost immediately. Mary filled a thermos with warm milk and left it beside him. Then she lay down on her own bed, smoking and waiting. She smoked two cigarettes slowly and tried to read but the words were meaningless marks on the page. She got off the bed and wandered round the flat, standing for a long time at the door of Frederick’s room, listening to his shallow, scratchy breathing. A little later, she put on a light coat, thinking that she might go out for a walk and then remembered that Johnny might telephone. She looked at the instrument, black and dusty on the dusty table, and felt afraid. She lifted the receiver and dialled the operator.
She said, ‘I’m sorry to trouble you, but I’m expecting a long-distance call. Has anyone been trying to get through?’
‘What is your number, caller?’ Mary told her. ‘I’ll check with the supervisor and ring you back.’
Mary waited, breathing lightly, staring at her reflection in the wall mirror. There were glistening beads of sweat on her nose; she rubbed them away with the back of her hand. She let the telephone ring three times before she picked up the receiver.
‘We have no record of any long-distance calls to your number,’ the operator said.
‘I see. Thank you very much.’
There was nothing else she could do. In the end, she lay down on her bed again and slept, off and on through the night, with bad dreams. She woke, stiff and cold at first light. The window was a square of deep, transparent blue. Outside, in the area, a grey cat crouched motionless on the dustbin, eyes glowing like yellow mica, fur ruffling in the faint, dawn wind.
Frederick was still asleep, breathing more easily. She closed the curtains so that the early sun should not wake him. She shut his door gently and went into the tiny hall to telephone the hospital. The Ward Sister had a pretty, Irish voice. Mr. Franks had had a comfortable night. They were very pleased with him. He was awake now, could she give him a message? Mary was startled by her friendliness, so warm and unauthoritative. ‘Only my love,’ she said.
In the kitchen, watching the percolator bubble grainy brown, she felt suddenly only relaxed and tired as if she had been up all night at a dance. She told herself that she was infinitely relieved, though in fact she had not really expected bad news, not simply out of a hardy, irrational optimism, but because when the worst might happen her nature made it impossible to expect it. Even when death was inevitable, as at the end of a wearying, mortal illness, it would still strike her with a quality of ghastly surprise. And she had not once admitted that Charles might die. She thought of him as she thought of herself, as tough, indestructible, able to be hurt or humiliated but never to be finally broken, not a person to pity.
Not like Johnny, in whom humiliation was pitiable. She could think of Charles’s suffering without shrinking; it was physical, could be dulled with drugs, would one day be over and forgotten. Johnny’s was a slow, endless torture, the agony of a man who has had the best of his life and knows it.
Or did he know it? She thought with a quick, bright gleam of hope: no one is beaten until they believe they are. Of course he was desperate and despairing now or he would not have run off to Oakes, but she could make him see reason, give him a belief in survival. Drinking the strong coffee she felt resilient, able to dismiss Frederick’s argument that Johnny was exceptionally vulnerable as sentimental nonsense. He had had bad luck, he had been to prison, but for something that loomed no larger in the eyes of the men who could help him, than a young man’s mistake. He had injured a friend in a moment of justifiable anger. Men did worse things, endured worse things, and went on living. For a little while she was able to think like that. Despair has its limits, she was content to let it fade like the morning star outside. Johnny was bound to telephone quite soon. Whatever agony had torn him yesterday would have receded by now and the considerate habits of a lifetime would assert themselves. He would realize she was worried, would want to reassure her; instead, she could reassure him. She could give him good news about Charles, beg him to come home.
It wasn’t until much later in the morning, when he did not ring, that doubt returned. She began to see that she had been arguing from her own standpoint, not from his. There was a difference—and not just because she had a woman’s lack of principle, a woman’s capacity for survival. The difference lay in the quality of their expectations.
Like most people, she had never expected very much. She had never been starved or badly treated or very frightened; she had had no harsher teachers than Mrs. Ames, known no cruelty other than the low-grade, unintentional cruelty of careless or stupid people; but she had been brought up in a world where no one thought her important; taught, early on, that she could hope for no especial privileges, that any security above the meanest she must grab and hold for herself. It was a world in which decency might win, but only by a short head.
Johnny’s upbringing had not only been more comfortable, but more morally attentive, his mind was cared for in the same automatic way as his fine young teeth, his education handed over to gentle, conscientious men like Sandlewood who would never be careless or stupid, to whom a child was a precious trust to be protected and taught to be honourable and courteous and tolerant. Most children unlearned these lessons fast enough, but Johnny had learned them too well without ever understanding the rider: that the world is a decent place just as long as you are buttressed by money, or like Frederick, have learned to live without it. The war did not harm him, it merely lengthened the period of illusion so that by the time it ended the facts of life were distorted beyond his powers of correction. He expected to return to a world that was still securely held, behind safe walls.
Most people’s education is a little hypocritical, the world is not the place we would like our children to believe it is. She began to see, with growing, impotent anger, that Johnny’s had been a large-scale confidence trick.
The morning dragged on. Mary opened all the windows in the flat, letting in the gentle, shifting sun. It was a lovely day, not too
warm, with a light breeze that was little more than a soft, pleasant movement of the air.
She telephoned Fitchet after Lester had left for town, not quite sure in her own mind whether her timing was deliberate or accidental. She spoke to the foreign maid who said that Sir Lester had not been worried when they had not returned the evening before. He had simply assumed they had decided to spend the night at the flat. It was exactly the answer Mary had expected—had hoped for—but she was conscious of an odd, perverse feeling of disappointment. There was nothing she could do, she was sure of it, but she could not avoid the feeling that if Lester knew what had happened, he would be bound to think of something. It was purely instinctive, an almost superstitious trust in his wholesome, bulky practicality, but when Frederick suggested she should get hold of him at his office, every nerve end in her body recoiled.
‘I’ll have to tell him soon,’ she said. ‘If Johnny doesn’t come back. Or if he doesn’t telephone. But not yet, Fred. Let’s give it a little longer.…’
He shrugged his shoulders. He was up and dressed, though he still looked pale and sick. ‘Aren’t you just putting it off? Or course it’s embarrassing, but he is his uncle. You can’t let it drag on too long.’
‘I don’t want to make any more telephone calls,’ she said quickly. ‘Johnny is bound to try and ring soon. What time would they be due in Liverpool? He may not have had a chance before.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It can’t be much longer.’
‘I hope not.’ Frederick’s anxious eyes blinked at her. His expression held an embarrassed pity and it repelled her.
‘You don’t have to stay. I shall be all right.’
‘Of course I’ll stay,’ he said wanly.
The telephone rang once. It was the local laundry who had been trying to deliver some sheets; the man had called several times but had been unable to get an answer.
‘We’ve been away,’ Mary said. ‘I’m sorry. Oh—it doesn’t matter. Next time the man comes he can leave the box in the hall.’ Bright spots appeared in her cheeks. ‘For God’s sake—yes. I’ll accept the responsibility if it’s stolen.’
She slammed down the receiver with adventitious indignation. ‘How stupid people can be,’ she muttered, glaring at Frederick.
After that, the telephone remained silent. Nobody came. Nothing happened. They sat in the drawing-room and drank black coffee and smoked. When her packet was finished, she went through the flat with methodical desperation, flinging open drawers, searching cupboards, diving into coat pockets in the wardrobe. In the end she found two stale, dry cigarettes in a box of Florentine leather that had fallen down at the back of the bookcase. She smoked them and then sat, doing nothing. It was a long, quite useless vigil.
The policeman came just before midday. He was a fat man, bulging
in his uniform, with a polished, red face.
‘Mrs. Prothero?’
‘Yes.’
He cleared his throat noisily. ‘I wonder if you’d mind coming down to the station. The Inspector would like a word with you.’
‘What about?’
He looked perplexed, just a little worried. ‘It’s to do with your husband, Mrs. Prothero. I was just to ask you to come.’
The long apathy of the morning vanished. For a moment she was terrified, her legs shook under her, sickness rose in her throat. The policeman’s face bobbed in front of her as inanely as a red balloon with a face painted on it. Then, suddenly, though her body still trembled, it was only with the quivering excitement of relief. One of two things had happened: either the drunk in the first-floor flat had made some ridiculous, garbled statement to the police, or Johnny had given himself up. Of course—the thought came into her mind like a fresh morning wind blowing out all the old, stale fears of the night—of course that is exactly what he would do. How could she ever have doubted it? For the first time she admitted the knowledge that she had shrunk from up to now, that he had not known whether Charles was alive or dead. It was as beautifully simple as the solving of a geometry problem once you know all the stages. If Johnny had thought Charles was dead, or even badly hurt, he would certainly have gone to a police station once his first despair, his first wild panic, had subsided. It was unthinkable, wasn’t it, that he should do anything else?
She smiled at the policeman, whirled down the stairs into the flat.
Frederick said in a quiet, hurried voice, ‘I’ll come with you.’
‘I’ll be better alone.’ She smiled at him. She knew exactly what she was going to say. Nothing but the truth; the truth would show Johnny had not been to blame.
His forehead creased. ‘Don’t be too heroic. They’ll see through that.’
She touched his arm, loving him for his sad concern but desperately anxious to shake it off like a nice, but gloomy companion on a voyage. ‘I’ll be sensible,’ she said.
They drove, in the black car, through the sunny morning. London was bright and clean and sparkling. There was some sort of military parade down the Mall and cars were jammed round the sides of the Palace. At the traffic lights, the sightseers waited, mothers with children, pale young men in their first good suit, their first job, charwomen on their way home after the morning’s cleaning, standing square on painful feet, corsets poking, mock leather shopping bags bulging. The breastplates and medieval plumes appeared, shining safe and proud above the hot, uncomfortable pavements; the charwomen smiled and pointed like children at a fair.
‘Traffic gets worse every day,’ the policeman grumbled.
The lights changed, the crowds began to move, the car slid into a side street. ‘Here we are, Mrs. Prothero,’ the policeman said.
It was dark inside the station, after the sun. Mary stumbled a little on the threshold, her mouth suddenly dry. The policeman’s hand steadied her, guided her through a door into a small office with a high, barred window. There was a desk, a gas fire, surprisingly turned full on with a little cup of water in front of it like a votive offering, a chair which the policeman pulled forward for her, close to the fire. ‘If you wouldn’t mind waiting a minute,’ he said.
He went out. The room was silent as a cell and stiflingly hot. There was a smell of pine disinfectant. The heat from the gas fire scorched her legs. She moved the chair and it made an alarmingly loud sound on the polished floor.
A man dressed in ordinary clothes came in. He was thin, with a thin, dyspeptic, worried face and no air of authority at all. He didn’t smile but seemed nervously disturbed like a clerk who has just found a mistake in a petty cash ledger. He offered Mary a cigarette from a metal case that looked as if it had been made for practice by an engineering apprentice, muttered, ‘It’s like a furnace in here,’ and turned off the gas fire.
He sat down behind the desk and asked for her name, Johnny’s name, their address. Then he frowned as if there was quite definitely a mistake; at least one and sixpence had been mislaid. He said, ‘I’m sorry, Mrs. Prothero. Your husband has been involved in an accident.’
It didn’t occur to her that it was an odd way to put it. She simply felt a blind surge of gratitude. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘of course it was an accident. If you like …’
The naked astonishment on his face stopped her.
‘Have you heard, then?’ he said, with what seemed ridiculous surprise.
‘Heard what?’
‘No, of course,’ he said quickly. ‘Of course you haven’t.’ He paused, watching her with a curious, restrained diffidence. ‘Your husband was travelling in a lorry with a man called Oakes. Did you know that?’
‘Yes.’ She looked at him, merely puzzled, half wondering if this was some kind of trap.
He said, ‘There’s been a bad accident. I’m sorry.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
She remembered that day and that night and the next three or four days only as a series of sharp images of landscapes and people’s faces; the running, white horse glimpsed from the train, the child in the yellow dress perched on the level-cross
ing gate—so clearly and intensely remembered that they might have been the first horse, the first child she had ever seen, the factory chimneys fouling the hot, blue sky, the backs of small grey houses with their small, gallant gardens, the woman in the white apron hanging out her washing in an apple orchard; the faces of the people behind the rope that guarded the entrance to the quarry, the little boys, the idle and curious adults, and Lester’s face, tighter and smoother and pinker than ever with distress and anxiety and, perhaps, annoyance. He had had to cancel a very important business engagement.
No one, it seemed afterwards, had at any point told her the story in one piece. She supposed that the main part of it must have come out at the inquest, though all that remained of that prolonged and tedious function was a sharp, physical memory that, in the course of it, the sweat had soaked down between her breasts like a cold, tickling insect and her hands had left wet marks on the back of the seat in front of her.
She heard it in snatches, some of them as meaningless at first as the stray bits of an abandoned jigsaw puzzle, but able to be fitted together in the end with only an occasional piece missing here or there, in the gentle, respectful rumble of a policeman’s voice, the cold twang of an ambitious young reporter who had the initiative and the brazen ability to get past the Sister and visit Oakes in hospital, in the words of a man who pushed through an idle crowd to thrust his hand through the window of the hired car, into hers. He said, ‘Your husband’s a brave man. We won’t forget him here.’ His voice was loud, slightly blurred by the fading effect of a lunch-time session in the pub, his manner one of assertive, self-imposed authority. Perhaps it set the key for the newspaper reports the next morning, most of which were highly coloured, over-imaginative, and to some extent untrue.