In Honour Bound

by Nina Bawden

  Len Oakes had been bound for Newcastle, not Liverpool. His mother’s lie may have been due to ignorance or to an automatic habit of deception. Anyway, his journey was perfectly above-board though once they were clear of the Midlands he struck slightly west, curving north on minor roads, whether from a simple desire for scenic beauty or an even simpler one, to show that he was not bound by the official routing, no one knew. They had driven through the early evening and the night, stopping at a transport café where they bought a meal that Johnny didn’t eat and a cup of coffee. He had never been in such a place before and Mary knew how he would have looked; his suit, the stiff, fair moustache proclaiming his separateness, glancing round him with a shy look in his golden eyes as if he wondered what he was doing there. He had asked for a telephone but they told him it was out of order, which wasn’t true: the telephone was a private one in the owner’s bungalow at the back of the café and his wife and children were asleep. After they left the place, Oakes had offered to stop at a call box but Johnny had told him that it didn’t matter, he could telephone when they reached Newcastle.

  He seemed sunk in apathy, hunched in his seat, sometimes answering Oakes when he spoke to him but more often not appearing to hear, just staring through the dark windscreen into the long, bright tunnel of the headlamps. Oakes had no idea what Johnny intended to do when they got to Newcastle, nor why he had left London. He said Johnny had ‘acted a bit queer and vague’ but Oakes lived in a world where people were often in trouble and on the run and you didn’t question your friends. Everyone was engaged, after all, in fighting a private battle in which society was the careless and implacable enemy. On the other hand, in spite of his term in prison, Oakes had not thought of Johnny as someone of his own sort at all. So that when he had burst into his mother’s flat, Oakes had felt not only surprise but a certain pleasurable vanity. Not many people had ever asked Oakes for help. That the man who had turned to him was Johnny, not only loved and admired, but also seen, in a way, as one of the enemy, swelled his fancy and thrust him at once into a synthetically gallant role. Johnny’s loyalty to his friends was bred in him like his bones and brain; Oakes’s loyalty was a pale, celluloid copy but on this occasion it functioned in the same way. If Johnny wanted to go to Newcastle, he would take him without a word.

  They went on through the night, a long drive, unremitting and chilly as they climbed up into the hills of County Durham. The route they took was lonely and dark. Mary thought it must have seemed to Johnny during those long hours that the journey would never end, and perhaps he no longer cared. He had not only lost his known, warm world, but he was himself lost. He had done something that was beyond the range his imagination could cope with and for which the consequences might well be so final and so terrible that he could not think of them. He had only tried once, and not very hard, to telephone Mary or the hospital, whichever had been uppermost in his mind. Perhaps he was quite sure Charles was dead, perhaps it hardly mattered. His action had been the same whatever the outcome; there was no consolation, no solution, he had come to the end not only of courage but of hope. He must have looked out of the cab through the grotesque misting on the windscreen and trembled inwardly at the raw morning as he saw what a savagely strange place the world was, how uncaringly bleak the air above the uncaring hills. He had come a long way to this cold dawn, this world that he now found, solid, but without reality. Oakes said that when they stopped on the hill above the village, at the run-down shack advertising breakfasts, he groaned suddenly as he got down from the cab and said, ‘Oh, my God.’ Oakes had thought he was ill.

  Lester and Mary saw the man who had given them breakfast. He was at the inquest, a great, shambling Welshman, so fat that his collar would not fasten and the flesh sagged like a pig’s bladder above his partly fastened flies. He breathed like a rusty tin whistle, crippled by his body’s failure; he had asthma as well as some glandular disease. His hands were white and soft like rolled feather cushions. They enclosed Mary’s damply and briefly, at the entrance to the stiflingly small parish hall where the inquest had been held. She listened with dulled politeness in spite of Lester’s fidgeting glances, while the Welshman mumbled something about being sorry; not many people called in, he went on in a tone of resentful surprise, as if he were regretting only the loss of a customer. ‘And he didn’t finish his bacon neither,’ he mourned preposterously, ‘a nice piece of long back, cut good and thick.’

  Mary started to smile but his eyes stopped her, sad, and pleadingly human in the repellent armour of his flesh. He had given evidence at the inquest, she remembered now, about the brakes. They had talked about them over the tea and bacon, against a wireless turned up too loud so that the man had not heard the conversation very clearly. He thought Oakes had said there must be a leak somewhere in the hydraulic system but he had not seemed to think it particularly serious. The brakes held when you pumped them. ‘I told them,’ the man said—he had repeated this simple statement at fabulously tedious length in the witness box—‘You can’t be too careful of brakes, man.’

  It was Johnny, he thought, who had crawled under the lorry to look at the main cylinder but he did not know what was said when he emerged again because he had gone into the house to clear up the dishes and it was no business of his, anyway. Besides, there was a nasty little wind blowing, it was often like that in September, chilly and treacherous, and he had to be careful of his chest. As a matter of fact he was due at the clinic for a check up at nine-thirty and had a bit of tidying up to do before the hospital car called for him at nine. Mary frowned. This gratuitous piece of information seemed to ring a cold, warning bell in the corridors of her mind but she could not, immediately, see why. She steeled herself for some long, rambling account of ill health—Lester, wearing a controlled expression of stony impatience, had already moved off towards the waiting car—but what followed was worse.

  ‘He was a hero, girl, I’m telling you,’ he said, as he had already said at the inquest. Emotion was moist and maudlin in those little, imprisoned eyes, emotion of a most enjoyable kind. Mary was filled with a sudden, shamed revulsion.

  They had both been brave—even Oakes. When he crawled out from under the lorry, Johnny said something was leaking, but he had thought, so Oakes maintained, that it would do until they got to a garage. The brakes had given when they were just over the brow of the hill. The road wound downwards through the cold, morning air, the end of the hill was out of sight.

  Oakes didn’t panic. He said, ‘Jesus Christ, here’s a balls-up.’ He pumped the pedal and slammed into bottom gear. For the first bend, the gear held them, the next was steeper. They took it a fraction too fast for safety. Oakes was sweating into his eyes. With luck, though, the incline would flatten, there would be a run-in to a side road, a quarry.

  Johnny said, ‘It must have been the main cylinder.’

  ‘Hang on, matey,’ Oakes said grimly, and rounded the next bend.

  The whole country stretched out before them. The morning sun was misty over the scars of mines, over the grazing sheep, the grey, dreaming villages, the grey, dew-drenched grass.

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Oakes. ‘Oh my Sweet Christ,’ and then the vista narrowed, gave an illusion of safety as the road turned into the hill, a little rise, another bend.

  ‘Run off the road,’ Johnny shouted as the stony field opened on their left but Oakes was panicking now, frozen to the wheel, his reactions not trained to the voice of command, not a soldier; an undisciplined, blustering boy who could drop an old man and steal the sweet shop till but hadn’t the nerve for action, not even to save his own skin.

  The scream of the gear was frightening; a harsh, tearing, mechanical sound. The truck, rocking, came round the last bend into the straight run down. The village was off to the left of the road, safely, deeply in the valley, a small, grey, hideous village, the colour of slate. But fronting on the road itself was the parish school, dirty brick, corridors tiled like a public lavatory, windows like slits as if the place had been bui
lt to withstand a siege.

  Oakes began to scream. ‘For Christ’s sake—get out.’ Fear took him, he thrust at the door with his strong, young arms and was out, sprawling on the road, cracking down hard on his collar bone and breaking both legs above the knee. He didn’t lose consciousness straight away. He saw the truck swerve, the open door crack and tear. Then Johnny must have been in the driver’s seat because the truck was steady for a moment; for that short moment perhaps he thought he could get away with it, steer past the little school, down into the safety of the flat valley. But the lorry had too much momentum, it wasn’t a risk to take. Half a mile before the school there was a quarry, empty and abandoned, with a steep run-in. With luck he might have done it; inside the quarry the ground rose sharply before it ended in sheer walls. The lorry hit a stone, tottered on two wheels as if in some ritual dance and crashed on its side. He fell through the empty doorway and the lorry fell on top of him. It didn’t kill him at once. By the time they found him, he was still alive, and crying. He died on the way to hospital.

  ‘A hero,’ the Welshman repeated. ‘I can’t get it out of my mind. All those kiddies in school—about that time they would have been singing their morning hymn.’

  It was almost convincing. The children singing away, raucous-voiced, sweet or droning, to the thump thump of an old upright piano, innocently unaware behind the frail protection of old, crumbling brick, while the truck crashed down the hill towards them.

  ‘What time was it?’ Mary said suddenly. ‘What time did they leave your place?’

  He hedged a bit then as he had hedged in the witness box, not because he was a deliberate or even a natural liar but from some inherited, bardic desire not to pare the truth too fine and spoil a story. It wasn’t much, after all, a few minutes here or there, his brass kitchen clock hadn’t been seen to since his mother’s day and was inclined to ‘run fast’as he put it, but not so much; for his ordinary, day to day needs, it was a perfectly reliable guide. But there was the wireless, wasn’t there? Mary persisted. Blaring so loud at breakfast that he had only heard a fraction of that conversation about the brakes? At that time of the day they announced the time at regular intervals and he would have listened, if he wanted to be ready for the hospital car at nine o’clock?

  ‘Well … yes,’ he admitted grudgingly, less out of wariness than because it was a question that had not been put to him before and he suspected dimly that as it had not been asked, he hadn’t been given his proper due. After all, he was the chief, indeed, the only witness. Apart from his account, there was only Oakes’s statement, taken in hospital: no one had actually seen the accident. He looked at Mary morosely. Any slight alteration in his story had been harmless enough—who wouldn’t, if they could, add a touch of colour to a drab picture? But if she wanted another answer, she could have it.

  He told her and she looked through him as if he had suddenly vanished like a ghost or a dream. Then she smiled in a tired way and walked slowly to the car. A pudgy faced reporter latched onto the Welshman and moved him off persuasively, down the village street towards the pub.

  The car moved off. Lester said uneasily, ‘I only hope the papers don’t make too much of it. It would be a pity. What was he doing in the lorry, after all? We don’t want those sort of questions, what?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘For Martin’s sake,’ he said heavily. ‘We don’t want it splashed about that his father had been in prison, that he’d just tried to kill a man. It looks—as if he wasn’t much better than a criminal on the run, don’t y’know?’

  Although he brought the words out boldly, his face was sweating. His eyes moved unhappily out of the window, avoiding hers.

  ‘A terrible business,’ he said breathily. ‘Terrible.’ But she saw he was torn. His grief had been real, even now his eyes leaked the occasional manly tear. But though he had seen Johnny, though he had drawn back the sheet and stared at him with shocked eyes, it was relief that informed his brain. A difficult situation had been averted, the family name had not been dirtied with failure but touched with honour; it was an easy way out, a fitting end.

  A short while later, in the train, he settled into this attitude as comfortably as into his seat in the first-class dining-car. He watched Mary spread raspberry jam on a toasted bun and clumsily patted her hand as he said his prepared piece. It was a terrible business but there was some consolation, wasn’t there, in pride? Perhaps not yet, naturally, she was too shocked and upset, but later on. Martin would have a memory he could admire.

  He thought she looked at him strangely. She was very pale, her eyes very dark and bright.

  She said, ‘It was all so pointless.’

  ‘My poor girl.…’ He felt very sorry for her and wished that he liked her better, that he didn’t feel so uncomfortable beneath that sharp, measuring stare. He did his best. ‘It wasn’t really, y’know. He did a splendid thing. You heard what the coroner said? And a couple of women came up to me outside when I was waiting for you in the car. I wish you’d heard them. It was touching—really touching.’ He was touched himself; he blew his nose.

  She said, ‘All right, he was brave. But there was no point. Do you know what time they left the top? It was twenty minutes past eight. There was no one in the school, no one. He was a liar, that old man. A story teller, rather. Carried away—it was such a good touch, wasn’t it, the children singing in the school?’ She looked at the utter disbelief on Lester’s face. ‘Didn’t it occur to you? That someone—if it had been later—would have seen something, heard something?’

  Lester said, ‘They were singing. Nine o’clock, he said, didn’t he? They wouldn’t have heard.’ He stirred uneasily, reached for his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. ‘Everything’s so damned noisy nowadays. D’you look up, every time you hear an aeroplane?’

  He was alarmed by her expression. ‘Mary dear.…’ He stopped, eyes straying, face pale and worried. ‘It doesn’t make any difference,’ he said finally, ‘not to—’ he fumbled for the right words ‘—the final assessment, if you like. You can’t think he had time to look at his watch? He just did the right thing without thinking—what counts is that he did it, you see. The courage …’

  A phrase came into her head and she used it. ‘Brave without purpose.’

  ‘No,’ Lester said uneasily.

  ‘Yes.’ She gave him an odd, twisted smile, she felt as if everything had twisted inside her. She hated herself, she hated Lester. She said wildly, ‘Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.…’

  He frowned, he didn’t like her smile. Up to now, though she had wept in the train going north, he had been glad she was ‘sensible’. He could not have stood a woman deranged by grief. He could think of nothing to divert her from this odd, half-mad aberration except practical matters. Lighting a cigar, he spoke of them.

  ‘There are one or two things we ought to get straight. First—you must not worry about money. I know you like to be independent, of course.’

  Mary caught the censorious note in his voice and stiffened. ‘I shall be all right,’ she said instantly. ‘There’s the flat. I could sell it, I suppose, if Clara will let me. I shan’t want to live there.’

  ‘No, of course not.’ He sighed, relieved. ‘I’m glad you’ve decided to be sensible about that. But I hope you’ll take advice. Don’t rush bald-headed into anything. We’ll get Rudge to go into it thoroughly, see what is the best thing to do. I daresay, properly invested, you can expect quite a decent little income, apart from capital gains. The market’s going up at the moment.’

  He examined the half inch of ash drooping from the end of his cigar. ‘Another thing. Naturally—I shouldn’t expect an answer to this suggestion straight away. You’ll want to think it over. But we should be delighted, you know, to do our best for Martin. No—wait a minute. Look at it reasonably. You’ll want to go on with your job’—he smiled indulgently—‘you’re a young woman.’ He added delicately, ‘Some day you will marry again. But until then,
Martin needs security. The house is pretty empty. He can have a home with us if—when—it suits you. He’s a fine boy.’

  For a moment she was touched, she had never doubted his affection for Martin, she did not doubt his sincere intention now. Then something—the eager hope, almost the lust, in his eye, made her aware his suggestion was monstrous.

  She said, ‘That’s a mistake, isn’t it, that’s been made once already? How can you be so terribly irresponsible?’

  He chose not to understand her, his cheeks puffed out with indignant astonishment. ‘That’s unfair, Mary. You know I’d do my level best for the boy.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He watched her cautiously. ‘At least, let me help with the school bills. You can’t deny me that. Let me see to his education. Johnny would have wanted him to go to his school. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Johnny’s dead,’ she said. ‘I can look after Martin.’

  She didn’t hate Lester any more. She was only tired of him— infinitely tired of his vast complacency, his insistent, confident investment in a dying world. Her England, she thought, was different from his, an England of small gardens, suburban streets, the grammar school and the scholarship, the safe perspective of people who expected nothing, only the small security that lay in their own hands, their own brains. Even when Johnny’s world had excited her most, the beauty and freedom of a life that included Fitchet and the confident inheritance of the earth, even when she had been most aware that it was better than the boring, otiose suburbs, the limited visions, the limited minds—even then his world had seemed unsafe to her, a perilous dream that could so easily turn life into a slow, sad decline. ‘No, Lester,’ she said. ‘He’s my son.’

  ‘I’m not doubting it,’ he said, half humorously, getting a good grip on himself, determining not to be angry. ‘My dearest girl, let’s get one thing straight. I’m not trying to buy your boy. If it’s me you object to, that’s fair enough. I’ll admit we haven’t always seen eye to eye. But leave me out of it for a minute. I’ll admit something else, if you like. I want him. I like children—I only had one son—and I love Martin. If you don’t want to let me have him, I understand that. But you mustn’t let the boy suffer. I’d never forgive myself. Would you consider another suggestion? Two others, as a matter of fact. I spoke to Clara last night. She wants, if you will agree to it, to set up some kind of trust fund for Martin. Not much, she’s not a rich woman, but enough to give him a decent start. Of course she’ll put all this to you much better than I could, but let it stand. And the other thing is that I telephoned Sandlewood. I had to do that, the boy’s due back next week, and I thought you’d probably want to be with him for a bit. I know that was none of my business but I wanted to take some of the practical arrangements off your shoulders. Call me an interfering old fool if you like. Anyway—the upshot was this. Sandlewood was very upset. He thought a lot of Johnny. He says the school will be willing to take Martin, without fees, for the rest of his time there.…’