by MARY HOCKING
‘Hey! You can’t do that! We’re closed.’
Kerren said, ‘Of all the cheek!’ Robin said, ‘Really, some people!’ Adam turned in his chair to watch. Jan had reappeared with a jug of steaming coffee which he put down carefully on the table.
The door of the restaurant opened and closed so quickly there scarcely seemed time for the three men to come in. One of them locked the door and put the key in his pocket. The pimply waiter, who took a long time to assimilate facts, said, ‘Hey! You can’t do that!’ One of the men hit him low in the stomach and he reacted to that fast enough. Everything happened very quickly, and for a few seconds the group at the table remained frozen, unable to adapt their minds to this turn of events, feeling, in spite of the evidence of their eyes, that it was so unlikely that it could not be true. The melancholy man had picked up a chair and broken it across a table; two of the other men were systematically sweeping glasses off the tables and pulling lamps out of the brackets, while the third man relieved himself against a wall.
Jan said to Adam, ‘There’s a way out at the back.’ He picked up a chair and hurled it across the room. Adam caught hold of Kerren who seemed to be transfixed in her seat, hypnotized by the melancholy man and his odious companions; he almost carried her through the swing doors to the kitchen. He could not find the light switch and they groped their way, knocking against tables, overturning a pile of plates. But Robin, moving with the swift certainty of a cat, was already at the back door; she had it open and there was fresh air and a lot of very distant stars. She kicked off her high-heeled shoes and ran down a dim alley screaming like a dervish. Adam said to Kerren, ‘Get the police!’ and she stumbled after Robin. She was half-way down the alley before she realized that he was not with her. She had no idea what to do, she turned this way and that, grabbed a dustbin lid and started back, then realized that there was nothing she could do and that they must get help. Robin went straight as an arrow for the main road.
There seemed to be no sound from the restaurant when Adam turned towards it. At the back door there had been no time for decision, it had seemed more a matter of chance than anything else that the door closed with him still inside the kitchen. But here, in the unexpected stillness, a second decision had to be made which was more difficult. He would not have minded so much if there had been all the obvious sounds of a rough house; but there was nothing to rouse the blood and dim the senses. Adam, standing in the darkness, had the feeling that he had sometimes experienced during the war that some hideous thing long expected had at last caught up with him. In fact, although he had been torpedoed, he had never had that moment when an ungovernable violence was turned against him alone. He had not expected it to come to him in a London backstreet. As he made his way across the room he was more frightened than he had ever been in his life and he knew that his resources were quite inadequate to meet this situation. It seemed no thanks to his will that his legs carried him forward.
But when he opened the door and walked into the room, it was as though he had dived into an icy sea and had come up, all feeling gone. He was not hopeful of the outcome, but rather indifferent to it. In fact, leaving hope on the far side of the door was something of a relief. It seemed absurdly melodramatic afterwards, but at the time he was convinced that he was going to be killed and had better get it over and done with.
The melancholy man was hitting Jan in the face while two men held him down in a chair and the third strained his head back; the flashy ring had sharp edges which opened great gashes in the flesh with every blow. The pimply waiter was sobbing quietly under one of the tables. The melancholy man jerked his head in Adam’s direction and said, ‘See to him.’ The man who had been holding Jan’s head back now moved towards Adam, a razor between his fingers. Adam took the coffee jug from the table and threw the contents in his face. That disposed of him. Jan grabbed at the legs of the man nearest to him and brought him down; it was the most he could do and Adam was left with the melancholy man and his remaining companion. This was too much opposition, they were experienced operators and the melancholy man was even more efficient with his boot than with the ring. His companion had a buckled leather belt which added variety to the treatment. The man with the scalded face was blundering about, screaming for help; no one paid any attention to him, but his screams heightened his comrades’ taste for violence and as Adam was capable of the most resistance he came in for the heaviest punishment. He was barely conscious when the police arrived, but they were still alternately kicking him and lashing him with the belt. The police tried to prevent Kerren from seeing him, but she insisted on being with him and accompanied him in the ambulance.
Chapter Twenty Four
‘Woman runs screaming into Bayswater Road’ was the headline in the News Chronicle. The story was on the inside page and merited only a few lines; no names were mentioned. Robin thanked God for the shortage of newsprint. The police were more demanding.
‘I had to give them a full statement,’ she told Jay and Evan. It was easier to talk to them than to Kerren who was in no state to consider other people’s problems. She was rather ashamed about talking to Jay and Evan, but she had to confide in someone. ‘I don’t want Clyde brought into this. It’s all so squalid. I’ve got to think of him.’
‘It’s not pleasant for any of us.’ Evan was merely stating a fact.
‘Least of all Adam.’ Jay, like Kerren, was entirely emotional in her attitude.
‘It was Adam I was thinking of at the time,’ Robin defended herself.
They accepted this; if she had not acted so quickly things would have been much worse for him. The report from the hospital was reassuring; it would be some time before he was on his feet again – ‘But there is no permanent injury, concussion, some nasty lacerations and several broken ribs,’ the registrar had said cheerfully. ‘Nothing that won’t mend.’ Relief was followed by a more objective appraisal of the situation. Robin discovered that security meant more to her than anything else and she was afraid that this realization might have come too late.
‘The best thing you can do is to go back to Cheltenham at once and explain what happened to your husband,’ Evan advised. ‘It’s a fairly straightforward case and I doubt if the police will trouble you much.’
‘Clyde will know that I was with Jan.’
‘He probably suspected that you would see him when you planned to come down here.’
‘But it was the only time I saw Jan, and it was all so completely impersonal! I’d decided that I never wanted to see him again, but Clyde will think I’m throwing him over in a panic’ Whichever way one looked at it, she cut a poor figure.
‘You’d better go back before he hears about it from someone else,’ Jay said. When Robin had gone, she said, ‘What a little bitch!’
‘She’s got a lot of problems,’ Evan answered.
‘Your detachment is quite lunatic!’ Jay said. ‘Don’t you worry about Adam or the business?’
‘It wouldn’t help Adam or the business if I worried,’ he pointed out. But he was working into the early hours of the morning and even his nerves were on the stretch.
Robin tried to have a serious talk to Kerren before she left. ‘I feel so awful going away and leaving you like this. But I’ve got to consider Clyde. I know what you must think of me, and it couldn’t be worse than what I think about myself . . .’ It was no use. Kerren was completely inaccessible. Adam was heavily doped for the first few days and Kerren went to see him every evening, sitting quietly by his bed, holding his hand. Other people did not exist and she barely noticed Robin’s departure from the scene.
She hated the hospital; its whiteness, the smell of antiseptic, the starched dresses of the nurses, the bright uniform smiles, the carefully regulated cheerfulness of the matron, all seemed indicative of a struggle with death. Adam was in a ward on the top floor; as Kerren climbed the stairs her heart pounded and she had to stop at each landing to rest, trying to compose herself, adjusting her own face to the mask of resolute chee
rfulness. She dreaded the moment when the screen at the door of the ward was removed and visitors were allowed to enter. His condition fluctuated from day to day and she never knew what to expect. One day he would be in pain and scarcely aware of her; the next day he would be much brighter and she would go away relieved and hopeful only to have her spirits dashed the following day.
The weather did not help. It was very cold. Fuel rationing was more stringent than ever. The electricity frequently failed and the gas pressure was very low. It took an age to boil a kettle. Kerren slept badly and had nightmares in which violence predominated. Sometimes it was overt violence; but more often it was a sense of menace behind the trivial. She was stamping books at the counter in the library and she knew that something terrible was going to happen, was perhaps already happening, on the far side of the shelves. And she was not really in the library; she was in a place that she could not, or would not, identify. People were as unreliable as place. A man she had seen only yesterday standing beside a fruit stall was floating in a lake and she knew that he was really Dilys. Then she was running through the streets, late for the boat train; there was someone she had to find, she kept calling Mr. Phillimore but it was Peter for whom she was really searching. No one was what he seemed, all the characters had changed parts. But Con, instead of taking another person’s identity, had adopted a yellow carnival mask which gradually began to disintegrate as she looked at it; holes poked in the cheeks, teeth crumbled, strips peeled off the forehead. She ran from him screaming and was immediately confronted by a nurse who said sternly, ‘Take off your clothes.’ She was paraded naked through a canteen; her fingers clutched at material, trying to drag it around her and she woke to find the eiderdown slipping off the bed.
She was bitterly cold and the rubber hot water bottle was chill against her thigh. She got out of bed and filled the kettle to heat more water for the bottle. Then she sat by the window, the eiderdown draped round her. She said, ‘Oh Adam! Adam!’ because it seemed that it was of him that she had been dreaming.
Ice had formed inside the window, there was a thick layer on the sill. Beyond the window, the sky was light, she could see the roof-tops silvered with frost, the skeleton branches of a tree, quite still. No movement anywhere. The city’s muscles were cramped with cold.
This was the kind of night when Londoners had waited for the drone in the sky, for the jewelled arrow silvered by searchlights, for the swish and hurl of a bomb. Nothing now. The city waited for something to fill the vacuum left by war. And what was stirring in the rubble and the dust, evolving in the vacant lots? At times, she felt that it was something monstrous that was taking shape there, preparing to shamble into the city streets. A new invader with no siren to herald his coming.
She felt very small and insignificant, and much less secure than she had felt during the war when she had known her place in the scheme of things and what was expected of her. So much had been stripped away since then, all the old traditions and customs were suspect. Perhaps it would have been as well, before doing so much demolition, to have made sure that there would be something left at the end of it all, that one hadn’t taken the guts out of life. Not that she usually felt like this; it was only lately that she had this hollowness inside her. Hope seemed to have blanched and grown sick this winter. She would not believe that this was anything but a transitory feeling, she had lived with hope a long time. It would survive. But sometimes the nightmares spilt over into day-time life. She could not bring herself to go back to the restaurant, she did not like to walk alone at night. It would pass, of course, it would pass. London, like hope, would survive. A people who had withstood Hitler were not going to allow violence to take root in their own backyard.
The kettle began to sing and steam blurred the windows. She went to fill the bottle, being careful to put cold water in first because the rubber was wearing thin: a rubber bottle was practically an heirloom and definitely irreplaceable. She climbed back between the cold sheets, holding the bottle against her stomach. It was quite surprisingly comforting, better than any amount of philosophical argument.
It was Christmas week. A lot of cards arrived, many from ex-service friends suggesting reunions in the coming year. Kerren left them in a pile on her dressing table and when at last she opened them they seemed to belong to a very remote part of her life. Evan and Jay tried to persuade her to come to them for Christmas, but she refused.
‘You’ve had a terrible shock yourself,’ Evan told her. ‘You need a rest.’
‘And Adam really is going to get better,’ Jay said. ‘He’s badly knocked about, but the surgeon has said that there won’t be any major ill-effects.’
‘But they did that to him! They did those awful things to him. I can’t think of anything else . . .’
Cath, who was home for Christmas, also offered hospitality plus the services of her psychiatrist who was at a conference in London. Kerren refused both offers. The only person with whom she felt reasonably secure was Mrs. Neilson who no longer seemed formidably sophisticated but a sensible middle-aged woman in whose company Kerren could relax knowing that she would not be pestered with unsolicited advice. In the end the two women spent Christmas quietly together.
‘Did you have a nice dinner?’ she asked Adam on Christmas afternoon.
‘It was like being back in the navy,’ he answered hoarsely. ‘All the doctors in funny hats. I know how the ratings felt now.’
It was the longest speech he had made so far and Kerren was delighted.
Kerren asked Cath if she could spare the time to help Jan. He had not been kept in hospital and was working harder than ever at the restaurant. ‘I feel so wretched about him; but I can’t bring myself to go there at the moment.’ Cath, who had at last found work which tested even her stamina, and who was harrowed by some of the things which she had seen, had looked forward to a quiet Christmas. Nevertheless, she accepted this task without complaint.
‘It was nice to see Jan again,’ she reported later. ‘His face is an awful mess, of course. But I felt that we understood each other better. After someone as intellectually complex as Garth, Jan’s psychology is very rudimentary.’ She admired him, nonetheless. He was bending all his energy to the task of building up trade again. Customers had been frightened away and it was going to be a long, uphill struggle. He accepted this without complaint, he was used to beginnings. Cath told him that he was very brave. This did not please him. Although he was willing to boast about his physical prowess, his spirit chafed at the thought that he should be cast for the inglorious role of Sisyphus.
Robin wrote a long letter to Kerren.
‘I have told Clyde all about it. He asked a lot of questions about the way the police had cross-examined us; but when I tried to explain about Jan, he just said, “Yes, yes, yes, that doesn’t matter,” as though he was afraid to listen. Recently he seems to have drawn away from me. I think he has decided that as he is saddled with me and Terence it would be unendurable if he were to lose what little store of love he has in reserve. So he keeps out of my reach so that I can’t smash everything up. It’s easier to tolerate each other now that there is this distance between us. Sometimes I wonder whether it’s worth trying to build up his trust again; maybe we’ll manage better if we’re indifferent to each other.’
She went on to ask about Adam. By the new year he was improving and Kerren was hurrying up the stairs to his ward. It was wonderful to be able to do something for him; she took his pyjamas to wash and iron, she searched the papers for anything that might interest him and got into trouble at the library for cutting out all the book reviews, she spent her lunch hours queueing at fruit stalls. In the middle of January she could reply to Robin, ‘Don’t worry too much. Adam is on the mend and Jan seems to be back to normal except for his poor face. The police have everything in hand and I don’t think there will be any serious repercussions now.’
That was before John took a hand. He had, of course, been to see Adam in hospital and he had also helped Jan
and Jacob to do some repairs at the restaurant over the Christmas break. He seemed quiet, almost dazed; the shock had had a more prolonged effect on him than on those who had been actively engaged in the affair. Kerren supposed that he felt responsible for what had happened. This proved to be the case. As soon as it was apparent that she had recovered herself sufficiently to pay reasonable attention to other people he came to see her. She was ironing Adam’s pyjamas and John sat on the divan while she worked. At first she did not take in what he was saying.
‘I couldn’t leave it any longer,’ he said apologetically. ‘As it is it’s been too long.’
‘Too long for what?’ she asked.
‘To do something about Barney Cartwright.’
‘Barney Cartwright . . .’ How they had laughed at the name! Kerren sprinkled water on the pyjama top. ‘What about Barney Cartwright?’
‘He was behind all this.’
She pressed the iron down and there was a hiss of steam as it touched the wet collar.
‘As far as I can gather,’ John went on, ‘the police have been led to believe that these men started a fight for no apparent reason. But we can’t withhold information about Cartwright. You do see that, don’t you?’
She put the iron on the asbestos rest and regarded John warily. In spite of the cold, beads of sweat were beginning to form along his hair line.
‘There’s no need for you to worry. I’ll see them. But I felt I must tell you before I did it.’
She turned off the switch and stood, her hands resting on the ironing board, looking across at him.
‘And what are you going to tell them?’
‘The truth.’
She stared at him and he returned her gaze unhappily, but steadily.
‘You must be mad.’
‘I’m not mad, Kerren.’
‘You’re going to tell the police that we delivered a load of black market food to Jan’s restaurant?’