by A. L. Barker
“I’ll take you to the country, it’ll be quiet, I promise.”
She curled into a corner of the couch, turning her back and hiding her face from him. Her voice came muffled and fretful. “You promised I could go wherever I wanted.”
“It wouldn’t be suitable for you to go to Thorne, it wouldn’t be the thing. You must see that.” He looked at the arch of her back, he had no experience of children but wasn’t she acting like a child, too young a child to follow an appeal to reason? “Thorne’s not pretty. When the tide’s out the estuary is all mud, miles of grey mud. We’ll go to the sea, to Hastings or Folkestone or Leigh.”
Suppose he treated her as a child, picked her up and slapped her hands and made her listen to him?
He couldn’t, of course, no child had a line like that from ankle to thigh. “My wife would wonder, she always does.” He could hear Bertha asking, saving her questions from one week to the next, slowly getting through them if they both lived long enough.
“And there’s Emmy, her sister, she has imagination and she tends to think the worst. She’d have plenty to say.”
What might be said or asked did not shake him as much as the notion of Emmy and Bertha and Marise all together in the same place.
“It isn’t pretty,” he said again. “At this time of year the mud dries fast, it’s very pervasive, the smell of drying mud.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said into the bowels of the couch.
“It can be unpleasant. People say it’s healthy but people often believe that unpleasant things must be good for you –”
“Jack doesn’t like me going out, anyway.”
“There are plenty of places, nice places we could go. Epping or Kew – but it’s not so quiet there, of course. We could take a boat from Hampton Court – would you like that?”
“I don’t like listening to you. You talk like everyone else.”
He was not coming up to her expectations. If only he knew what they were he could try to act the superman. Better still if he knew what they weren’t. She seemed to expect a kind of devil. He felt helpless, more so than at any other time of his life. When Scobie was dying he had desperately wanted to do something, but now he had to, it was a crying need – what else could he call the clamour inside him?
The teddy bear was doubled up, so was she, with her face on her knees, her cheek scarlet.
“You’ll make yourself sick.”
Through the window he saw Tomelty and a woman approaching the house. Tomelty was panning wide his feet as he walked, he had turned up the brim of his hat and crammed it over his ears. The woman struck him amicably on the chest.
Ralph watched them through the curtain and as they reached the porch he said, “I’ll take you to Thorne.”
Marise looked out of her fingers. “When?”
There was a day in each week when Bertha and Emmy went to Chelmsford shopping. He thought that if it were possible for her to see Thorne without seeing them, there would be no harm done – and perhaps some inconceivable good. He couldn’t conceive it but his cause certainly needed it.
The door opened and Tomelty came in. He still had his hat crushed over his ears and he was laughing, bringing the joke with him.
Marise uncurled herself. She looked at Ralph, sharing her fright, and he thought that if it was fright on his account it was another inconceivable thing.
“Well now, my wife’s entertaining,” said Tomelty.
“The postman left a parcel here for me,” said Ralph. “Mrs Tomelty kindly took it in.”
“That’s neighbourly. Don’t let her take you in, though.” Tomelty blinked, but there was nothing blurred about the look he gave Ralph.
“What have you done with your hat?” said Marise. “It does look funny.”
“I was demonstrating.” Tomelty turned to the woman who stood in the doorway. “Mamie, I want you to meet Mr Shilling, the gentleman from upstairs.”
She had clear, canine eyes and Ralph felt them go through to the back of his skull, look round, and withdraw.
“You wouldn’t think she was my mother, would you?” Tomelty put his arm round her shoulders, Ralph saw that he was proud of her. “All women should raise a family while they’re young, then the children have something to look at.”
“Listen to him.” Mrs Tomelty looked at Marise.
“People take her for my pettit ammy. Did you ever see such a girl of fifty? She still gets whistled at, that’s some sort of record. But you’d be surprised what a long memory she’s got.”
“I shan’t surprise this gentleman,” said Mrs Tomelty.
“What are you demonstrating with your hat turned up?” Marise asked Tomelty.
“That a bowler doesn’t suit me.” He nudged his mother. “Go on, Mamie, surprise Mr Shilling.”
“She doesn’t remember the same things as he does,” declared Marise. “How can he be surprised if he’s never heard of them?”
“I can remember quite a lot myself,” said Ralph. “We should probably cover much the same ground.”
“I fancy not.” Mrs Tomelty folded her arms. “If I have some nasty things to remember it’s through no fault of mine.”
“But Mr Shilling’s not one of them?”
Marise cried, “How could he be? He’s been a sailor, he’s been to sea, he hardly ever came to England.”
Tomelty rounded on her. “What’s this?”
“He was captain of a ship and he gave it up to be near his invalid wife. He started as a cabin boy, he’s been to America and India and China and round the world a hundred times.”
“He is not John Brown!” shouted Tomelty.
“Of course he’s not.”
Ralph, looking from one to the other in his own surprise saw that they each had a different expression. Marise’s was all joy, Tomelty’s nose was white and his mother was stoking her disapproval by staring round the room.
Ralph himself was concerned about Marise’s lying for him, and charmed by the transparency of it and happy that she had done it. Her wrong reasons didn’t matter, she had done it for the right one – that she wanted him to stay.
“I see she’s still got that thing.” Mrs Tomelty pointed to the teddy bear. “It should have gone on the fire long ago, twenty years ago. You know that, don’t you?” she said to Tomelty. “You’re in a fix, boy, and you’ll have to get yourself out.”
“I shall.” Tomelty pulled the hat off his head. “So help me God –” the hat shook in his hands as he forced it back into shape – “I don’t care if He bloody hinders me, I’ll get out of it.”
“Tea for everyone, even for Barbra.” Marise picked up the toy and swung it by one leg. “And especially for Mr Shilling.”
“Thank you, I must be going upstairs.”
“That’s right,” said Mrs Tomelty, “and don’t come down here again unless you want to play dolls.”
8
Ralph did not choose the moment to ask for Tuesday, with Pecry no moment was better than another.
“Tuesday off?” To serve his purpose Pecry would pretend not to understand a colloquialism.
“Not come into the office,” Ralph said patiently.
“I believe you have exhausted your leave entitlement for the year.”
“This is a special case.” Certainly it was. Ralph looked down, squirming on his feet. Pecry had put his cold finger on lesser secrets than this one which stood out all over him. But he heard himself say flatly, “I’m afraid I can’t come in on Tuesday.”
“Can’t, Shilling? What impediment can you foresee to doing the work for which you are paid? Am I to understand –” Pecry lifted Ralph’s gaze with the force of his own – “that you are refusing to work on Tuesday?”
“I’m asking to absent myself. It’s family business, something I must attend to.”
“Family business? What family?”
“I have a wife and sister-in-law.”
“You have no progeny.” Pecry sighed.
“Two women are trouble
enough,” said Ralph cautiously. Habitually Pecry did not express regret or relief or impatience, habitually he did not express himself at all.
“I have a son –”
That was unwonted too, the way he stopped short, the way he looked at Ralph. Everyone knew that he had a son – by asexual reproduction, Krassner said. Anyone else might have chosen that way to begin a confidence.
“Is it all right about Tuesday?” said Ralph.
Pecry did not seem to hear, he who heard and weighed everything. He asked Ralph a question – and not one of his probes either – on an entirely different subject. He asked what sort of man Ralph thought he was. Ralph kept silent because he had not got beyond the question whether Pecry was a man at all.
“Am I the sort to father a mental and moral shipwreck?”
“Of course not.”
“I gave him fibre, integrity, principle –” The words were pushed out, perhaps he had rehearsed them to himself, over and over, examining and assessing and cataloguing, but they came battering out now – “and I gave him shelter, a boy needs to be sheltered until he learns how not to make a fool of himself. Now –” a bead appeared, a clear bead of moisture on Pecry’s dry lip – “now he makes fools of all of us.”
No-one had been able to make a fool of Pecry, not even Krassner to whom it had been worth the sack to try.
“I can’t walk down the street in his company. People laugh at us. Shilling, he’s a –” the bead broke as Pecry’s lip curled – “a Flower Person.”
Ralph wanted to smile at the notion of a weedy young edition of Pecry in a carpet coat and daisy-chain but the old edition’s humiliation was not funny. It was disturbing: having always known where Pecry stood, Ralph preferred him to stay there, he certainly didn’t relish the prospect of his coming nearer.
“He’ll grow out of it.”
“I shall never trust him again.”
What was Ralph to make of that? It was a gratuitous piece of information, a confidence, a declaration of despair from Pecry who never confided and had never been known to despair. But Ralph supposed that no-one could stay in character all the time and confidences weren’t so much reposed in other people as thrust upon them.
“At sixteen I held a position of trust.”
Pecry talked a lot about trust, about expressing and maintaining it and Krassner had done a sketch of him as Dog Tray with a nude girl balanced on his nose.
“It’s a phase, he’ll laugh at himself in six months’ time,” said Ralph. Being allowed to see under Pecry’s skin was a privilege he had not sought. “There’s nothing unusual about it, it’s part of growing up.”
“But what into? What is he growing up into?” Pecry seemed to be appealing, asking for a right answer, one which would be right for him. “His clothes are fit only for scarecrows, renegades, apes!”
“It’s a kind of uniform. All kids like to dress up. With me it was the Boy Scouts, I wasn’t content until I had a bushwhacker’s hat.”
“Depravity I could root out, but if I extirpate this rottenness, what remains? Not a man –” Pecry’s scalp blazed through his thin hair, “nor a woman, either.”
“There’s nothing sinister about it and it’s better than the Hitler Youth.”
“The only uniform I ever wore was the King’s and I put that on when I was ordered to.”
“For which? Hitler’s or the Kaiser’s?”
“What?”
“Which war did you wear it for?”
“Does it matter? I’m asking you, Shilling, is it possible for a properly functioning brain, however immature, to conceive that the world’s problems can be resolved by sentiment?”
“Make love, not war?”
Pecry fixed Ralph with his fish’s eye. He was trying, pressing – pressing Ralph, of all people, for an answer which he could accept. “According to your theory is it part of a child’s development to lack moral and common sense? To believe that wrong-doing should be licensed and crime go unpunished?”
“You may not like the idea and it’s definitely anti-social –” Ralph found himself wishing that Pecry, even Pecry, could see the joke, but of course it was private, wonderfully private – “but some people do get away with murder.”
“What do you know about it? Or the issues involved? Issues? They’re root and branch!”
“I could give you a case in point. You may remember it. A man named John Brown murdered two women and it was generally known that he had. Why did he do it? was one question. When? was another. If one answer could have been found, just one, they’d have hanged him. Think of it, all the forces of criminal justice couldn’t pin anything on him. There’s a song about John Brown’s body mouldering in the grave – but his goes marching on.” Ralph rocked up on his toes.
Pecry frowned. “I’m talking about my son.”
“It’s lunch-time, come and have a drink.” Ralph startled himself, asking Pecry to drink with him.
“I never take alcohol in the middle of the day.”
Yet when Ralph turned to the door Pecry stood up. Somewhere along the line a break had been made and he needed to show it to someone. He was not entirely the man people thought he was and he was showing Ralph because caste-wise there was no-one else. Pecry came first and Ralph came next – a long way after, but in lieu of family, friend or lover Pecry turned to the order of seniority.
“This is to go no further.” He settled his Homburg levelly above both eyes. “This is in strict confidence, Shilling, it must not go beyond these walls.”
Ralph left him to follow if he chose. He expected that Pecry would not choose because habitually he didn’t drink. He hoped that he wouldn’t because if he, Ralph, accepted – was obliged to accept – Pecry’s confidences now, he would also have to accept the blame for them later.
But of course Pecry wasn’t acting habitually and in the bar across the road Ralph found him at his elbow.
“This will help me to listen,” Ralph picked up his glass, “though that –” he nodded at Pecry’s lemonade shandy – “won’t much help you to talk.”
“I talk? I came to hear you develop your theory that immorality and imbecility are part of normal mental growth.” Pecry spat out the words with passionate disgust. “I could have sent him to a school where they undertake to eradicate that kind of thing, stamp it out. I’d have given them carte blanche to discipline him physically as well as mentally. ‘Mens sana in corpore sano’ is a fact and the regime is fully comprehensive. You understand? Punishment is designed to remould not merely to chastise. But the boy has a heart condition.”
“You were afraid they’d go too far?”
“They refused to accept him.”
Ralph felt slightly sick. Pecry really wasn’t human, but was he above or beneath humanity?
“You’re too hard on him. Leave him alone, he’ll be all right.”
“By whose standards?”
“By yours. They’re the ones he’s grown up with, aren’t they? He’s your son and heredity counts for something.”
“I have nothing to reproach myself with.”
There was no feeling sorry for anyone who could say that. He was rather to be envied. Ralph himself sensed reproach wherever he looked. It seemed to him that even living and breathing was done on someone else’s neck.
“My father brought me up to cherish the thought that one day I should be like him. He set me an example and I did the same for my son. Whatever good I have done has been for him to emulate, the bad I have not done has been for him to avoid.”
So he was a blueprint. It was one thing they hadn’t suspected. From Ralph down to the woman who came in to make the office tea, Pecry gave them all cause for surmise but no-one had thought of the obvious – that he was a pattern for a Pecry.
“My father swore that if he saw any of himself in me he’d thrash it out.” Ralph took a mouthful of rum and rolled his tongue in it. “It boils down to the same thing. He couldn’t set me a good example but he could knock the bad one out of me.�
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Pecry put his shandy aside with lips hard primmed. “I believe that a man’s best memorial is his son and I gave him a first-class education. I paid for private coaching, for extramural subjects, for encyclopedias and reference books, I paid for vacations abroad, study tours, season tickets and subscriptions. I paid doctors and dentists – my son often needs the doctor. I paid for his clothes, more clothes in one year than I could have use for in ten.”
“You’ve spared no expense to make him a fitting memorial,” Ralph said warmly. “There’s nothing wrong with that, everyone wants to be remembered and we’d all like to choose how and for what. I don’t think I’d choose your way even if I had a son. I’d prefer something strictly personal, more relevant, if you know what I mean. It might not last so long or it might outlive people and pass into legend – or into the records, anyway.”
Pecry frowned, but Ralph felt they were getting on to something interesting. “Which lasts longer, fame or infamy? That’s a knotty question. Of course Shakespeare said that the evil men do lives after them and the good gets buried with their bones. Let’s hope he was wrong.”
Ralph went to the bar and brought back another rum for himself. “Would you remember a murderer more than a saint?” he asked Pecry.
“I don’t anticipate my son being either.”
“He’s more likely to be a saint, the way he’s going, the first of the Flower Saints.”
Pecry stood up. “You haven’t been any help, Shilling.”
“I’m sorry –”
Pecry turned his back and Ralph raised his glass and murmured, “Marching on!” A girl in a group raised her glass and drank with him.
When Pecry had gone Ralph went across to her. “That was a private toast.”
“Did I intrude?”
“I shouldn’t mind fifty like you intruding.”
She smiled. “Quite the man, aren’t you?”
“Let me get you another drink.”
“Better not. I’m with my friend and he wouldn’t like it.” She was passably pretty although she couldn’t hold a candle to Marise, she was only flesh and blood, no miracle. “Some other time, shall we?”
No, no other time he thought, remembering how Marise had leaned out to him that morning from her window. She was in her nightdress, the chiffon or nylon or whatever it was kept slipping off the round bone of her shoulder, off her breast and just catching, clinging on the tip so that he could see where the pink began and that it was pink and not brown or red, it was the same colour as her lips.