John Brown's Body

by A. L. Barker

  Ralph wrote ‘two hundred pounds’ in the ‘Not Telling’ column. It was a solid figure and helpful among so many abstractions, though it had to be written as a solid loss. He saw small chance of intercepting Krassner’s bonus cheque before it was folded irretrievably into Krassner’s hand. Yet if he, Ralph, was to get off the razor’s edge the money must be paid in at once. He, Ralph, must pay it, but not out of his own banking account because it was his and Bertha’s jointly.

  Thus was Bertha brought into both columns. If ‘Telling’ meant telling her as well as Pecry, ‘Not Telling’ would mean not telling her the truth. Obviously she would have to be told something, most of the money in their account was hers, residue of a legacy from her father, and Ralph would require a valid excuse for withdrawing two hundred pounds. Bertha wasn’t mean, she was analytical – it came of having so much time on her hands.

  “I’m not mad,” Ralph told the cat, “but the circumstances are. The circumstances are mad as March hares.”

  He decided to go out for a while, he needed to hear voices outside his head. Already Bertha’s voice was saying, “You know best, dear, but is it an act of friendship to lend anyone that amount of money? And who is there to lend it to?” She knew that there was no-one, he was not involved in friendship to that degree. His own voice said, “You’ll have to trust me.” Why should she? She wouldn’t benefit. The best that could happen to her, the very best, would be that she would be no worse off – if Krassner repaid the money and Pecry did not find out and Ralph was not demoted. She would have to subsidise her husband because if she didn’t he was liable to a cut in salary and that would be the worse for both of them.

  As he went downstairs Ralph realised, too late, that Madame Belmondo was on the watch. She came clattering out in her wooden exercise sandals. “Mr Shilling.”

  “Good evening, Madame.” Hers was not a voice he wanted to hear. He tried to raise his hat which he was not wearing and the gesture became a fumble.

  “Mr Shilling, I must talk to you about that cat.”

  “The cat’s fine, it’s had its supper.”

  “I know you look after it, you’re kindness itself. But the creature’s savage, it’s savaged me.” She held out her grubby little white hand. Across the fingers was a long coral coloured scratch.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re not to blame. Neither am I. It was looking in at my window and I didn’t like the way it was looking. I tapped on the glass and it wouldn’t go so I pulled down the upper half and told it ‘Shoo!’ and waved my hand out and that’s when it scratched me.”

  “It knows some words,” said Ralph. “It’s pretty intelligent.”

  “My dear, I wouldn’t hurt it! I know how you value it. But this isn’t the first time it’s stared in at me in that malevolent way.”

  “It springs from sill to sill. Quite a feat when you think of the overhang.”

  “You’re so trusting. Windows open night and day. Of course it’s company for you.” There was a tiny wickerwork sound, Madame Belmondo was dimpling. “A man needs more than a cat.”

  “I’m sorry it scratched you,” said Ralph. “What can I do about it? Shall I pull its claws out?”

  She shuddered. “I think you should be very careful,” and suddenly coming close and reaching up on her toes said in a great whisper, “Have you seen the new people?”

  “I saw the girl.” Ralph’s nostrils twitched. If anyone smelt professional, this woman did, with an almost plangent perfume.

  “A girl is it?” She found and lightly squeezed his wrist. “And her husband, what is he?”

  “I don’t know, I didn’t see him. She’s pretty,” said Ralph. It was not the word he wanted, although of course she was. She was pretty as well as, but whatever else she was was the more important. The impressions she had left were oddly assorted. Pooled, he thought they might add up to someone outside his range and was surprised at the degree of thought he had given such a brief encounter. “She’s very pretty,” he said.

  “I expect her husband’s a strong young boy.”

  Ralph couldn’t be sure whether Madame Belmondo’s evident satisfaction in that was on his account or because of something she saw in it for herself.

  *

  In the bar of the Pilot a few people looked round and one man nodded to him. The walls were lined with mirrors, man after man lifted his chin and nodded. Ralph sometimes amused himself trying to calculate the maximum and absolute number of times any reflection could recur. There were eight mirrors in all, of varying sizes, so it was a nice exercise, though not as alarming as it might have been because the root equations had to be hypothetical, he couldn’t very well ask to measure the actual areas of glass. He would have liked a hard answer which he might have flashed around – ‘There’s a mathematical limit to the number of times one object can be reflected. I calculate it –’ if someone had brought up the subject. And why shouldn’t someone? Everything was talked about here sooner or later. “You don’t say! Is that a fact? This is something we all should know.” But a hypothesis wasn’t enough, men in bars were not dazzled by mathematical hypotheses. ‘If’ would stick in their throats, ‘assuming that’ would be cold gristle.

  The barmaid wished him good evening as she served him but when he remarked that it had been a nice day she smiled with personal bitterness and did not reply. In the mirror Ralph saw that among all the moving mouths his own grinned in isolation.

  The Pilot was a noisy place. It was patronised by a restless crowd – though not restless enough to get up and go. The crowd did no more, on the face of it, than raise its voices and shuffle its feet. An impression of vigour and alertness could be given by controlled fidgetting. Ralph had observed, not without envy, that the right degree of dash and disregard could carry off foot-wagging and hand-flapping, tic, lip-licking and open scratching of the crotch. Add a loud voice and a willing laugh and the general impression was of a live-wire, a comer. There were a great many comers at the Pilot in the evenings, which was what drew Ralph to it. He liked life – as a spectator, Bertha said. Bertha had given it thought.

  He sat down and crossed his legs, carefully avoiding the hem of a coat which a woman had slung over the back of her chair. On the table his glass stood in a slop of someone’s beer. He shifted it to a beer-mat, rubbed it gently back and forth to dry the bottom. The barmaid was watching him. She had a moment to spare, incredibly no-one wanted serving, she leaned her elbows on the bar and watched Ralph.

  It would be pleasant if he could think that she was interested. He did not think so, he thought that she was tired and that as she leaned on the bar he happened to be in her line of vision. If the old woman in the flower hat had been sitting where he was, the barmaid would have looked at her.

  Ralph shifted his chair to one side to prove it and at that moment someone called the girl away to serve. He was a bit mad to be thinking like this at this juncture. Was he seeking a diversion or another complication? Hoping, perhaps, that two wrongs would make a right?

  He raised his glass. It might profit him to reflect how much he would have to give up. He was a prudent man, but a prudent man still finds it expensive to run two homes, especially when one is not wholly his. Any question of reversal and his flat would be the first to go. It would be cheaper to pay the inflated fares from and to Thorne each day than to keep a separate establishment. That meant, literally, no place of his own. Thorne Farm was Emmeline’s – how it was Emmeline’s!

  “I want you to look on it as your home,” her voice said in his head. She wanted to have her cake and eat it, he and Bertha paid for their share of everything, they paid for more than their share because the only privacy they had was their bedroom. So far as he was concerned Emmeline ate her cake but did not have it. He went to Thorne on visiting terms.

  There were useful voices at the Pilot, they scrambled the voices in his head – he had a dutiful head, bent on giving others their say.

  “The Colonel left Thorne to me, but he wished Ber
tha to share it.” The Colonel had not known Ralph. The late Colonel was fond of Bertha. And the Colonel’s lady was no fool. Thorne took some keeping up and although she had plenty of money Emmeline was not averse to saving it. Expenses shared were expenses halved, last year it had cost Ralph two hundred pounds towards a new roof.

  Two hundred, the sum exactly. “These things happen”, he might say to Bertha, “like the roof – you can’t budget for them’. But there could not be another roof.

  He went to the bar with his glass. “Make it a double.”

  “Aren’t you devoted to this stuff,” said the barmaid unquestioningly.

  “It’s an old Navy habit.”

  Had she really been interested she would have asked was he in the Royal or Merchant. She looked beyond him, called along the bar, “I’ve only got one pair of hands.”

  There was a group which Ralph saw stationed always at the same end. The group fluctuated in size but the composition was stable: the members of it were steak-eaters who knew their way about, had beaten out their ways whenever the line of least resistance was not also the most profitable. They could be thought of as a crux, the Pilot’s tone – perhaps it amounted only to timbre – came not from the brewers or the publican or the neighbourhood, but from these men at the bar. Ralph had watched them putting up topics and shooting them down, putting each other up and blowing each other to blazes. They were privileged people, for them wheels turned and switches were thrown.

  When one of them finished a joke they roared all together and fell ritually apart with laughter. The place brimmed with noise, it was a change from the voices in Ralph’s head.

  From the far side of the room someone appeared to be contemplating him. A stranger with his overcoat hung open, his hat pushed back and bending the fleshy rims of his ears, raised his thumb in greeting. Or had Ralph imagined it?

  “You’re sitting on my gloves,” said a girl.

  Ralph stood up, there was nothing on his chair.

  “You don’t mind me asking? I was keeping that seat for a friend.”

  “I beg your pardon –”

  “Sit down till he comes, if he comes. I don’t feel comfortable with an empty place beside me.”

  Ralph sat down reluctantly. The girl wore dark glasses which he found intimidating.

  “You have to be careful who you speak to. I wouldn’t have come if I’d known I’d be sitting here alone. I’m hypersensitive and it’s an ordeal. ‘Half-past eight in the Pilot, I’m dying to see you,’ he said. I think he’s died and been buried.” She covered Ralph with her shiny round knees like a couple of guns. “It cost me something to go and ask for this little gin for myself. People make it very clear what they think of a woman on her own in a bar. As soon as you step over the threshold of a licensed premises they let their thoughts go. I feel like asking is the licence to slander as well as to drink.”

  Ralph was surprised. Didn’t the modern girl like to be thought liberal?

  “This place is a jungle. Do you see that tiger over there? He’s been eating me up with his eyes ever since I came in.”

  Of course the man with bent ears was looking at her, Ralph could see that now. The gesture with the thumb had been invitation, not greeting.

  “He thinks I’m with you, he’d try to make a kill if he knew I wasn’t.”

  I’m not being watched, thought Ralph, I just get in the way every time anyone looks at anyone else. That’s Krassner’s doing.

  “Have you a cigarette?”

  Ralph hadn’t. He preferred to smoke a pipe when at leisure.

  “Isn’t it silly? Even that barmaid scares me. I see what she’s thinking, honestly, it flays me when people think like that.”

  “I haven’t any cigarettes –”

  “God, how that man stares! Hasn’t he seen a woman before?” She pushed her dark glasses up on her forehead. “There, he’ll know me next time.”

  It seemed imprudent for one with such a terribly thin skin – and such a bare face.

  “I don’t think he means any harm,” said Ralph.

  “That depends what you call harm. The barmaid gave me a dirty deep look and not because I’m ambidextrous. She thinks I’m here with my flag up.”

  Ralph felt that he was being taught, it was being demonstrated to him that the most things only happen in the mind. He should remember, it should always be a consideration with him.

  “I can’t go and ask her for another drink. You know that? I just can’t!”

  “Inez is a very nice girl.” Ralph said earnestly, “She wouldn’t harbour such thoughts. I’ve heard her rebuke people for loose talk.”

  “Then there’s that tiger waiting for me to go and get myself a drink. When I do – crung!” She pounced with her hand. “He’ll be on to me.”

  “As a matter of fact, I thought it was me he was watching. It shows how wrong you can be about where people are looking and what they’re looking at. Resting your eye is another thing. We all do occasionally when we’re thinking about something entirely different –”

  “Oh stuff it!” the girl said loudly. She got up on her fierce black Dr Zhivago boots and went to the ladies’ room.

  Ralph gazed into the bowl of his pipe. He wondered why she had ended up like that. After all, she had begun it, so why the rage? Why with him?

  She wouldn’t have told Krassner to stuff it. Krassner would have handled her as he handled all women – successfully. But when did handling begin? How soon? Or was it a built-in mechanism that worked on sight?

  Krassner would have brought her a drink as if he were bringing light into darkness. Ralph had been about to do that, to get her a drink, but she hadn’t given him the chance.

  He was being watched. The man across the bar propped his neck on his hand and lazily considered him.

  3

  Marise had a visitor while Tomelty was away – her Uncle Fred Macey. He was not actually her uncle but her mother’s cousin and unattached, except loosely to Marise. He did not like Tomelty and Tomelty had no time for him, but on Marise’s side of the family it was agreed that Uncle Fred was attached to her. They said, according to their natures, that he had a soft spot for her, that he had his eye on her, that he made a fool of himself.

  They were wrong. One of his life’s preoccupations had been taking care that he was not made a fool of, he certainly wouldn’t allow it to happen by his own doing. Uncle Fred knew just how far he could safely go with Marise. It was really no distance and he had gone all of it. From time to time he dropped in on her to check the limits he had set and establish his position within them.

  He was not communicative and ordinarily Marise hardly noticed, she had enough to say for them both. Nor did it bother her what he might be thinking, she thought for both of them. But when she wanted information, as she did now, and came slap against his rooted objection to words, she could have screamed. She did in fact go and scream at half-cock in the kitchen and Uncle Fred remarked that the water pipes were noisy.

  “I know I shan’t like it here,” Marise had said, “it’s all so used. We had everything new at Plummer’s, we were the first to live there. We’re about the hundred and first here, I should think the thousand and first. It’s Georgian, Jack says.”

  “Never. It’s Victorian.”

  Marise was perching on the edge of the couch. She didn’t like its grubby patina nor its jungle smell. It disgusted her to see Tomelty spread out on it, and now Uncle Fred.

  “This place has graciousness, that’s what you can smell. Jack says it takes fifty years to come. I haven’t felt clean since I got here.” Her skin twitched delicately like a cat’s fur. “There are some queer people here. The woman upstairs wears two hats, one on top of the other.” It was a new experience for Marise to see challenge in Uncle Fred, she found it tiresome more than exhilarating. “And there’s someone who calls himself Shilling – there’s nothing to stop him doing that, I suppose. I should think anyone with his name, his real name, and there must have been a lot of them,
got rid of it quick.”

  “What name?”

  “John Brown.”

  Uncle Fred didn’t so much sigh as refute. Dissidence erupted from under his waistcoat and the band of his trousers, dissidence and disassociation. He got everything off his chest in one gust.

  “You should know,” said Marise, “being a policeman. Don’t pretend you’ve forgotten, you never forget anything. You could go on the stage with your memory, Jack says with your memory and his nerve he’d be rich.” Actually Uncle Fred’s memory was not special, except after a few brown ales when he could be relied on to tell about his days in the B.E.F. But Marise still had to find out how far flattery would get her with him.

  “I was a special constable.”

  “That’s what I mean, you know all about it. All the things we couldn’t know. They don’t let everything out at trials, they keep it on the police records. But you don’t need to look at records –” Marise drew her finger across the crown of his balding head – “everything’s in here. Jack wouldn’t tell me, he pretended it was too awful. The truth is, he doesn’t really know.”

  “I did patrol duty.”

  “That’s not all you did. You had to go to court, you had to guard prisoners – did you guard him?”

  “Knowing’s one thing, telling’s another.”

  “But you ought to tell me! I might be in danger. How would you feel if it all happened again – to me?”

  Uncle Fred took a biscuit and crunched on it.

  “I’m so alone in this great empty house. At night when Jack’s away I feel frightened, I die of fright, not knowing for sure. He looks like a murderer, he’s got a murderer’s face.”