by A. L. Barker
“She’s going to be ill and we must do something. She can’t. She won’t change her room, she says what would be the use. I don’t even know if she really believes in the rays.”
“I thought you said it didn’t matter.”
Bertha stopped the car outside the house and turned to him. “Oh my dear, if we don’t care, who will?”
She was not rebuking, only asking if he could care, really asking what would become of Emmy if he couldn’t.
*
He saw a change in her. She had puffed up like a sick fowl. She made a business of moving around and sat down as if she should not have been expected to get up, her rather splendid discontent tending to fretfulness. It could be self-induced, it could be one of her extremes which she was pushing herself to. Anyone could act tired.
He sighed as he dropped heavily into a chair and there was Bertha crying, “Ralph’s worn out!”
Why should Emmy want to be seen to be ill? She had always queened it, she had the material advantages – money and the house – and had made it appear a little ludicrous that he and Bertha only had each other.
“Has it been a busy week?” Bertha would have brought him his slippers but Emmy did not like people wearing slippers except in their bedrooms.
“Eventful more than busy.”
Emmy herself wore high heeled court shoes and each instep stood up like a ball. Did her feet usually swell towards the end of the day?
“What events, dear? What’s been happening?”
“Nothing really, at least nothing that would mean anything to you.” He was struck by the enormousness of the lie and stared at Bertha in dismay.
Emmy was the one who would not accept it. “Why shouldn’t it mean anything to us?”
“It was business.”
“Was there a take-over bid? For Picker, Gill?”
He wondered, if he were to tell them – “I met a rare creature, her name is Marise and she believes I am a murderer. She believes I murdered two women, two doting sisters like you –”
“Was there a merger? Why not a consortium of weed killers? To make them more lethal?”
If he told them, “She wants to believe that,” they would have the bare bones of the truth –
“Why stop at weeds?” said Emmy. “Or pests? Who’s to say who isn’t, definitely isn’t, a pest?”
– bare enough to be a distortion of it. And this they would accept, Emmy would insist on it. First and last Emmy would insist on a lie.
“You’ll never be out of business. ‘Killing Unlimited’ – hasn’t anyone realised the possibilities?”
“No take-over bids, just development. In business nothing happens for months, then everything happens in a week.” In life too, and he had cherished its uneventfulness, one day following another had been his method of happiness. Happiness was the desired norm then. Not any more, not for him, because a norm had to be shared – if only with his own past. “I don’t want to go into business history.”
“Why not? We have the time.”
“Supper will be ready in five minutes,” said Bertha.
“Let’s go into the history of one of your deterrents, from when it was a little noxious grain blowing about on the wind to now when it has a helicopter to drop it on the fields.”
Bertha leaned over and touched him in a rallying way. “I should go and wash your hands, dear.”
“What are we having?”
“Chicken. A little white meat will be good for Emmy.”
“I don’t want anything.”
“Emmy, you must –”
“Except perhaps a brandy.”
“You must eat – Ralph, she hasn’t had a thing all day.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not hungry. Don’t worry, it’s not serious. You needn’t ask me how I am.”
“I told him,” Bertha said quickly. “We talked about you all the way from the station.”
“How fascinating.” Emmy lay back in her chair and closed her eyes. “Is he going to get me a brandy?”
“Ralph will look after you,” said Bertha, “while I see to the supper.”
Neither of them knew that Marise was standing at his elbow. He had been keeping her for his own use, so to speak, but Bertha and Emmy had conjured her up and her presence filled the room. He might believe in ghosts, but she was much more than spirit. If Emmy had not had her eyes shut he believed she must have seen Marise standing out all over him.
“You don’t care what happens to me,” she said when he took the brandy to her. He remembered Scobie saying that in much the same tone: it was a help to her, a luxury almost, to have an imaginary pain after so much of the real thing. He remembered what sickness was like, watching Scobie die had made him an expert. He had come to know the testimony of every pore and every hair. “You don’t care so long as it doesn’t happen to the side your bread’s buttered.” Emmy was not really ill, she was slightly distempered as a matter of policy. Under her puffiness was a robust constitution, she couldn’t hide the small signs of health.
“Of course you’d like me to die. It would be a really useful thing for me to do, and leave everything to Bertha, to you and Bertha.”
She was wide of the truth but it struck him that she wouldn’t like the truth any better.
“Nothing’s going to happen to you,” he said.
“Go away.” Her hand, lifted to wave him away, struck his chest and she let it lie, palm down, against his waistcoat. “You’re such a terribly small man.”
“But I think you’re trying to make something happen and we ought to care about why.”
Her eyes blinked open as suddenly as one of those china dolls with their eyeballs on lead weights. “Bravo, darling!”
“If you’d ever been really ill you wouldn’t try to make it happen again.”
“Is that what I’m doing? I’m making quite a good job of it then.” Taking the brandy from him she threw up her chin and drained the glass. “There’s something wrong with this place. There has to be.”
Afterwards he told Bertha that Emmy was persuading herself that she was ill but would soon tire of the pretence.
“She can’t endure restriction, she won’t be able to keep the act going.”
“She’s never been ill in her life,” said Bertha. “It doesn’t make sense for her to pretend to be now.”
“Depends what you call sense.”
“There’s something wrong somewhere. She won’t let me send for the doctor. She says here –” Bertha pointed to the floor – “down here is what’s wrong. Won’t you do as she asks, dear? If someone came and divined, or whatever they call it, it would set her mind at rest. After all, she believes and it’s what we believe that matters, isn’t it?”
“She’s jealous, that’s what’s wrong.”
“Jealous?”
“Of anyone who’s got anything she hasn’t.”
“But she has everything she wants, within reason, and she’s not unreasonable. She wouldn’t waste time wanting anything she knew she couldn’t have.”
“She might if it was anything that had to be given, and wasn’t.”
Bertha said reprovingly, “She’s not alone, she’s got us.”
She hadn’t got him. Nor had Bertha now.
*
Tomelty told Marise to get dressed.
“Put on everything you’ve got, that pink suit and some sparklers and a face. I’ve forgotten what you look like in a face.”
“Have I got to go out?”
“That’s right. I have to see a couple of homs and I want them to see you.”
“Why?”
“Never mind, do as I say.”
She knew why, she had been exhibited before. Tomelty liked to show her to his business acquaintances. She was well aware that her effect was of several double whiskies – which Tomelty had not had to pay for. And she enjoyed leading them all on, really it was a continuation, an amplification of the leading-on of Tomelty which was one of the mercies of being m
arried.
But she no longer needed to count mercies. Something had happened, an important development. Tomelty did not realise: Tomelty, as usual, was in black ignorance.
“I don’t want to go out.”
“You’ve got ten minutes to fix yourself.”
She laid her hands on her stomach. “It’s like a saw-edged bread knife turning in a wound.”
“What is?”
“The pain.”
“You haven’t got a pain!”
“Barbra has, she’s got stomach-ache.”
Tomelty seized her by the chin. “But I can give you a pain, I can really give you something to think about, ma cherry.”
She shook her head and he gripped her chin. “Do you think I couldn’t?”
His capacity no longer interested her, she no longer wondered how far he would go. She had, she now realised, always known that he would go no distance at all.
“You’d just do it if you were going to, you wouldn’t talk about it. He never says a word about what he did.”
“Who?”
“He never once said to them that he would kill them.”
Tomelty gave her a shove and she fell on to a folding stool which folded under her, so she sat on the floor laughing, the white stripes of his fingers still showed where he had gripped her cheek. As she laughed the stripes were flushed out, her skin turned pink, silver pink.
“You’re talking rubbish,” said Tomelty, “you always talk rubbish and that’s how you’ve lived this long. I spare you because you’re not responsible.”
“You’ve never had your picture in the papers, have you?”
“Not for murder, no.”
“Nor anything else. Not even in an advertisement. Even Barbra’s been in an advertisement for stockings.”
“Don’t push me, Gyp. Try shutting your mouth.”
Marise lay flat on the floor and clasped her hands under her head. “You’re jealous, I can see that. He says there’s a lot of jealousy, people getting jealous of what he did.”
“He says? Bobsworth upstairs? What does he know about it?”
“He says people are jealous because they’d like to have done it themselves. You wouldn’t like to mess about with those women, would you? You wouldn’t like to touch them? He’d have to, wouldn’t he, he’d have to touch them everywhere for what he did?” She shone up at him from the grubby floor, fresh as a daisy among the old brown sticks of furniture. “I’d die if he was to touch me.”
Tomelty, who had been losing his temper, suddenly got it back, better than ever. He went on his knees beside her.
“I’ll prove to you he isn’t Johnny Brown.”
Frowning, she pushed her chin down into her neck. “My bosom’s not big enough, I can see my feet over it.”
“It’s big enough for me.” He put out his hand and she rolled away from him on to her side. “I’m going to stop you talking rubbish. There’s someone who knew him better than I did – she’ll tell you. Whatever she tells you stays told.” He said softly, “And she knows you, Gyp.”
“You can’t stop me talking. Unless you kill me. Do you think he’ll do it for you?”
“She never liked him, not really. They used to be very thick and she used to pack us out of the way when he came. That was some friendly society! And she often gave him a meal, I daresay she’d have given him anything else he fancied if he’d fancied it. But when she heard he’d been arrested she said, ‘I never trusted him’.” Tomelty smiled. “She didn’t want to.”
“She can’t stop me talking.”
“We’ll have her over and show her that wuzzo upstairs. She’ll tell you who he is.”
“I shall keep talking about Mr Shilling. I like him.”
Tomelty stood up, dusting his knees. “Talk about him, like him if you like, but don’t call him John Brown.”
*
Towards the end of her life Scobie had felt extraordinary – after all, it was extraordinary to be dying and to know it – and when Ralph saw that she excluded him along with the rest of the world, he was hurt. Then he came to understand why she was excluding him and that cruelty was bigger than both of them.
“You’re the same as everyone else,” she told him and it still hurt although he knew that she was loving and envying that sameness. She meant him to rejoice in it and cruellest of all was having to think himself lucky. He had tried to tell her that he was not one of a gay mob, but he could see that it only complicated things for her. She had reached a stage when she could not differentiate, indeed she had no time to.
Of course he was the same as everyone else – conformity was what civilisation was about – and throughout Scobie’s dying it was not the fact of being the same as other people which bothered him but the fact of not being with her, being cut out, surgically excised.
Now Marise told him, “You’re different. Jack thinks so.”
“I don’t care what he thinks, what anyone thinks – except you.”
“He’s going to bring his mother to look at you.”
“His mother?” When he was with her Ralph often thought he must be dreaming because there was a kind of dreamlike logic, a private sequitur between the two of them. What she said made crazy good sense just for him. “And will you think what she tells you to?”
“Of course not. I make up my own mind. If I did what I was told to do I’d be dead by now. Jack tells me to do killing things – ‘Get into the cupboard,’ he says, ‘and shut the door and let’s see how long before you suffocate.’ He says he’ll know where he is with me when I’m dead.”
That also made sense and for Tomelty it was terribly sensible. Legally she was his for his lawful enjoyment but he could not even enjoy breathing her air for fear someone else had breathed it too. He was justified, thought Ralph, exultantly breathing it.
“You mustn’t let her see you,” said Marise urgently. “You must go away when she comes. We’ll arrange a signal, I’ll put something in the window to warn you. I’ll put Barbra. Like this.” The thing had lost more of its stuffing and when she propped it on the sill it melted into a crouch. “Don’t come in if you see Barbra. When the coast is clear I’ll take her out of the window.”
“I don’t know his mother, why should I mind her seeing me?”
“She knew John Brown.” She was constantly leaving him with nothing he could profitably or safely do. He wanted to damn John Brown to hell and make her hear and understand. This was what he ought to do and now was the time. “Do you think she wouldn’t talk? Wouldn’t she just! She’s not like me, you don’t think she’s like me, do you?”
“No-one’s like you.”
“If she saw you she’d tell everyone, she’d tell the whole street.”
“Tell them what?”
“Madame Belmondo would have forty fits. Jack would shout murder and you’d have to go.”
She didn’t want him to go. He moved towards her, moving suddenly in his joy, suddenly feeling free to touch her, and she moved too, seeming to melt down and crouch, permissive, like the broken teddy bear. He stood with his hand outstretched and she waited, her skin tensed – he could see it tensing – for him to touch her.
“You mustn’t let her see you.”
There it was again, their private sequitur, she was mortally afraid of John Brown who was not here and had never been here.
“You don’t want me to go, do you?” He touched his chest, Ralph Shilling and blazingly glad of it. “They can’t do anything to me, I’ll be here when you want me.”
“Suppose she lies in wait for you? She’s cunning, suppose she hides –”
“Suppose I’m not John Brown.”
She stamped her foot. “Oh, good heavens!”
Scobie used to say that there was too much truth, that really there was nothing but truth. She challenged him to produce a hundred per cent lie and he said black was white and she said yes it was and he hadn’t produced even a half-truth. When he tried to argue, she said that anything could be true but nothing in t
his world could ever be false. He had supposed that she was grieving: after all, the truth she faced was grievous. But now he thought if there was so much truth about, why try to escape it, the goldfish might as well try to get out of the bowl.
“Good heavens,” Marise said again, “I should worry who you are, who anyone is in this place! Can’t you take a joke? You should see your face! You look like that old cat of yours. Jack says people do get to look like the things they like, he says I look like Barbra –”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“You think I’m pretty? Am I the prettiest girl you’ve ever seen?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know what girls look like now, I don’t see any.”
“Why not?”
“He won’t take me out. He doesn’t want people looking at me.”
“I’ll take you.”
“Will you? Where?”
To the end of the earth, he thought, remembering a place from far away and long ago, a beach of sand as fine as pepper with a quiet sea punctiliously rolling in, a private place without the ever present threat of Tomelty returning, where she would have no fear.
“Somewhere we can be alone.” He went close and she did not move away. She touched his hand, following with interest a big green vein with the tip of her fingers.
“Can it be anywhere I like?”
“Anywhere.”
“Then,” she said joyfully, “I’d like to go to your house.”
“My house?”
“Where you go at week-ends, where the women are, in the country.”
“To Thorne?” He was shocked. “Oh no!”
“Why not?”
“It’s out of the question, I can’t take you there.”
“It’s where I want to go.”
“But why?”
“I like the country. We went to Epsom once, to the races, and I ran away, I wanted to go where it was quiet but Jack was so angry he put me on a string like a dog. He missed the races, you see, looking for me.”