by MARY HOCKING
‘I can’t do otherwise.’
‘Oh, don’t be so bloody ridiculous! As if we haven’t got enough without this!’ She turned her back on him and sat on a chair by the window. He clenched his hands, his eyes watching her, narrowed as though each movement that she made touched an exposed nerve. ‘The time to have gone to the police was when we found the stuff, can’t you see that?’
‘Only too clearly now.’
‘Can you imagine how it will sound to them? It was all so hilariously funny at the time, like a comic opera. But that’s all changed now. You’ll never make them understand. Even I can’t understand the way we acted, so you can’t expect them to.’ He made no reply. His passivity frightened her; she made an appeal to him, leaning forward and speaking with urgent emphasis. ‘Look . . . listen to me, John. ‘This is how the story goes. We went down to Wales in a borrowed car with lots of petrol, to deliver some machinery we hadn’t even bothered to examine, to some people we’d never heard of, for a man we hardly knew. We spent a week-end at an inn where there was obviously something queer going on which we didn’t attempt to investigate because Adam wanted to climb the Beacons. When we left we were astonished to find a lot of food stacked in the boot of the car. And what did we do? Tell the police at once? Oh no, we drove back to London and gave the food to a friend who just happened to run a restaurant. He accepted it without question and we didn’t ask for any payment.’ She stopped. John moistened his lips. ‘You can’t tell them that, now can you, John?’
‘I can’t do anything else. I should never respect myself again otherwise.’
‘But they won’t believe you. They’ll think we are cronies of Cartwright who double-crossed him. Can’t you see that?’
‘But they will check up on Cartwright. We can’t leave him out of this.’
She clenched her fists and beat them against her cheeks, looking up as though to draw inspiration from above. John watched her. Everything that she did was at once a delight and a sharp thrust of pain to him. She said:
‘Do you realize that if you do this you will probably wreck a dozen people’s lives?’
He lost control for the first time. ‘Kerren, you’ve seen what happened to Adam and Jan!’
‘Do you imagine it’s out of my mind for one single moment?’
‘Then do you imagine that this will be the end of it?’
‘You mean, he’ll do it again?’
The sick anxiety in her eyes was all that he needed to harden his purpose. ‘Not to them. But there will be others.’
‘Others? I don’t care about others. It’s Adam I care about.’
‘Kerren, don’t you understand? We can’t cover up for this man.’
‘We aren’t covering up for him.’
‘Oh yes we are. If we don’t tell the police about him, we’re covering up for him as surely as if he had blackmailed us.’
‘Don’t you think I want him punished?’ she cried. ‘Don’t you think I’d like to tear him to pieces myself?’
‘Then you do agree with me?’
‘No, I do not agree with you! I’m not interested in justice. It’s Adam I care about. He’s suffered enough already I should have thought, while you were punting about in Cambridge. What is this going to do to him? “Publisher involved in black market warfare.” Can’t you see the headlines? And Robin. She will be dragged into it and her marriage will be scuppered. As for Jan, his business will be finished and he’ll most likely end up in prison. There’s no end to it. You’ll implicate the people at the inn and the farmer; even the couple of cops who helped us move the car will probably be demoted. And you’ll be sent down from Cambridge.’
‘I shan’t bring anyone else into it.’
‘For God’s sake, John! How can you avoid it? Take Jan, for example.’
‘I shall speak to Jan, of course.’
Jan was furious.
‘You give me this food I do not even want and then you report me to the police. You must be crazy!’
Kerren and Evan and Jay argued with him long into the night.
‘It’s a question of social responsibility,’ he insisted. ‘Like an unexploded bomb, or an infectious disease. You wouldn’t hesitate to do something then.’
At this point, Evan disengaged himself from the argument. ‘I think you may be right.’
‘Don’t be fooled by all this talk about social responsibility!’ Jay exclaimed. ‘What you’re discussing is the future of your business, and make no mistake about that!’
‘And what about Adam?’ Kerren demanded. ‘You’ve no right to involve him. It will break him.’
‘Adam was merely a passenger. I shall make that clear.’
‘As if he’d let you!’
‘It’s no use arguing with him,’ Jay said bitterly. ‘If he means to do it, he will.’
Afterwards, she said to Kerren, ‘John believes in goodness. He doesn’t realize that other people don’t. I worry about him. He thinks he can be himself in all circumstances. But you can’t do that; you upset other people and then they get vicious. I don’t know what will become of him.’
‘He’ll be a great man,’ Kerren said grimly, but Jay shook her head.
‘Virtue is its own reward. There certainly isn’t any other.’
So John went to the police. Contrary to expectations nothing much happened as a result of his visit. They were left in suspense. Kerren was in agony for Adam. It was all very fine for Evan to be magisterially detached, his reputation was not involved. But Adam would bear the brunt of it. John was younger; moreover he was an undergraduate and it was accepted that what was reprehensible in other men was mere high spirits in an undergraduate. But Adam was that most sober of all creatures, a professional man. People could vent all their moral indignation on him, denouncing him as indiscreet, irresponsible, lacking in judgement. And what could he say in defence? ‘We were just out of the services, where one took off on one’s travels without thought for food or petrol rationing. We hadn’t adjusted, we had a foot in two worlds still.’ It would be no use. The tale might have sounded well enough against the background of a trip to Wales; but the beating up in the restaurant had introduced an element of squalor which had contaminated everything. The thought of Adam in the witness box, pilloried by a clever counsel, was unendurable. He would be made to seem small, petty, faintly corrupt.
These worries diminished her joy in his recovery. He was much better now. When she came in the evening he would be looking down the long room, waiting eagerly to catch his first glimpse of her as she came past the screen. He was demanding manuscripts to read and was truculent if he was thwarted. He was making plans for the future, too.
‘Where do you want to live?’ he asked her once.
‘We’ll talk about that when you’re better.’
‘You should seize your opportunity. Most women would be only too glad to catch a man when he’s helpless.’
He was much more helpless than he knew, she thought sadly. He seemed to her in those days as innocent as a child and as much in need of protection. She could not bear to think of the way that people would talk about him, remembering his faults and failings – a tendency to arrogance, a refusal to compromise or to bother with things that didn’t interest him. ‘How are the mighty fallen!’ some would say. He seemed more precious to her than ever, so vulnerable, his pride in himself at stake. He would find this burden harder to bear than physical pain. Her perception was sharpened by anxiety and she found out a lot about him in those days. He was not nearly so self-sufficient as he seemed, he had problems of temperament, points at which his confidence needed buttressing, doubts which he could not always keep at bay. She wanted to shield and protect him, to make a small, warm place for him, a place secure from the things that threatened him, a place where he could believe in himself and where that belief could be carefully nourished. There was so much she wanted to do for him, if only he would tell her that he needed her.
In the end, when she knew that John’s little drama h
ad petered out into anti-climax, she could find it in her heart to be grateful to him because she had learnt so much from it.
John’s story had never found much favour with the police. The detective in charge of the case had already obtained a lot of information about Cartwright’s activities from his henchmen and he had several witnesses lined up who could be relied on to tell a nice, straightforward story in court. John’s intervention was an embarrassment. When he left the room at the Yard after making his statement, the detective said to the constable:
‘You know what that was?’
‘No, sir.’
‘That was a Cambridge undergraduate. The future brains of this country, God help us all!’
He reckoned that by the time John had finished telling his highly improbable story the jury would be so confused that they would never collect their wits again.
Time went by. The case was not due to be heard until the next quarter-sessions. The prosecution would call Jan, Adam and the two women to give evidence, but there was no indication that John would be required. Gradually tension relaxed. Adam came out of hospital and went to stay with friends in Hove. Kerren, whose life had centred round hospital visits, could find no way of passing the evening hours. It was late February. The weather was fine with an early promise of spring. All that hope and pain and longing stirring again. Did Adam really need her? Or was his spirit locked for ever in the tragedy of the dead Alison?
‘I don’t think I can live through another spring,’ she said to Mrs. Neilson when they were tidying up the garden one week-end.
‘You’ll manage if you don’t struggle too hard.’
‘You’re laughing at me,’ Kerren accused.
‘You want so much. But you attack life so hard that if one wanted to make you a gift, it would be necessary to knock you senseless in order to get it into your small, clenched hand.’
Kerren was not amused. She turned her back on Mrs. Neilson and went into the house where she found a letter from John awaiting her. Poor John! Her attitude to him had softened now that he appeared rather ridiculous. She wrote to Adam, ‘We must see poor John. I was very unkind to him.’
So they went to Cambridge in the spring. They were to meet John in the evening and they spent the afternoon wandering round the Backs. It was a bright day. Daffodils, narcissi, hyacinths carpeted the ground beneath the trees and in the distance Kerren could see the punters, their boats hidden so that the graceful young men seemed to be drifting between the flowers. Later they stood on Clare bridge and watched the punts coming towards them. Young men standing, their stretched bodies as beautiful as the swaying willows, girls reclining, hands trailing the water. They were so peaceful, so assured, so at ease with their world. A punt with three young men in it drew into the bank; one of the young men called to a couple in a punt just emerging from the shadow of the bridge:
‘Get Jimmy’s sweater while it’s still floating!’
Kerren leant forward and saw a yellow sweater floating in the water beneath the bridge. The sweater was recovered and the young men in the boat went on, unconcerned, laughing, but not stridently. There was no sense of a need to wring every ounce of pleasure from the moment, no strain, no striving after effect; they were confident, relaxed, and idle. So blessedly idle. She put her head down on the stone parapet and felt it warm and dusty against her forehead. She wanted to cry.
Adam had been like this. The thought bit deep into her flesh; she was incredibly wounded by the sight of these beautiful young men, by the swaying willows, the daffodils, the solitary cherry tree against a mellow brick wall. It must have been the happiest time of his life and she had not shared it. She had been denied any knowledge of the Adam of those years. She looked at him. He, too, was watching the young men in the punts. As a rule, he tended to hide his feelings, but now his features had relaxed and seemed to mirror all the pleasure that he had known in this place. She felt an aching jealousy of all those lost hours, days and years and she put out a hand to touch his jacket as though to reassure herself that she had caught up with him at last. He looked down at her, responding at once to her touch.
‘It is lovely, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I wanted you to see it like this.’ It had been on the tip of her tongue to ask him whether he had met Alison here, but suddenly this was no longer important. He had told her something that was far more important. She was a part of his present joy. The lost years were nothing; all that mattered was the reality of being together at this moment. She was filled with a sense of wonder. This was her miracle; it was carved in stone, affirmed by the green swathes of willow and the still glory of the cherry tree. She laughed, and he laughed too, caught up in her gaiety although he did not understand it.
‘Adam,’ she said. ‘Did you ever have a yellow sweater?’
‘Did I what . . .?’
‘When you were up or down or whatever it is . . .’
‘I’ve no idea. It’s important for me to remember, I suppose?’ They went to Corpus Christi, which was his college, and he showed her the window of his old room. She said all the right things. In the evening they walked through the streets, chilling after the sunset. The bell of St. Botolph’s chimed six o’clock. There were lights in the windows of some of the colleges. Kerren said, ‘I’m happy.’
‘Don’t sound so surprised.’ He put his arm round her. ‘I promise to make you happy all the days of your life. Even when you are a wizened old woman.’
But she was not thinking of the years to come. Here and now was enough.
Mary Hocking
Born in London in 1921, Mary was educated at Haberdashers’ Aske’s Girls School, Acton. During the Second World War she served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (Wrens) attached to the Fleet Air Arm Meteorology branch and then briefly with the Signal Section in Plymouth.
Writing was in her blood. Juggling her work as a local government officer in Middlesex Education Department with writing, at first short stories for magazines and pieces for The Times Educational Supplement, she then had her first book, The Winter City, published in 1961.
The book was a success and enabled Mary to relinquish her full time occupation to devote her time to writing. Long before family sagas had become cult viewing, she had embarked upon the `Fairley Family’ trilogy – Good Daughters, Indifferent Heroes, and Welcome Strangers – books which give her readers a faithful, realistic and uncompromising portrayal of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times, between the years of 1933 and 1946.
For many years she was an active member of the `Monday Lit’, a Lewes-based group which brought in current writers and poets to speak about their work, an enthusiastic supporter of Lewes Little Theatre, and worshipped at the town’s St Pancras RC Church.
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Copyright
First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus Ltd 1970
This edition published 2015 by Bello
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