by Gil North
Cluff put his watch back.
“There’s nothing to attract him here,” Alice Greensleeve said, and moved to stand by the old woman’s chair. She put a hand on the old woman’s shoulder: “You shouldn’t be up. You’re not better.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me.”
Greensleeve’s wife turned to Cluff. “It’s the time of the year. She’s taken this way at the beginning of winter. She’s been in bed for the last three days.”
The old woman, her face contorted, asked thickly, “Where were you?”
“What a night,” Alice Greensleeve said, “to go for a drive!”
They could have heard a pin drop in the silence that followed. Barker’s mouth fell open. He gaped at Cluff. Cluff swayed a little on his feet, eyes almost shut.
“Where?” the old woman persisted. “Where? Where?”
“In bed too.”
Cluff took a step towards the outer door.
“We’re not young,” Alice Greensleeve informed the room at large. “We’ve been married for a long time.”
“Barker,” Cluff said, backing to the door.
“There’s nothing else to do. I go to bed before ten.”
“You didn’t see him,” the old woman objected.
“We sleep in separate rooms,” Alice Greensleeve remarked. “He doesn’t disturb me when he comes in.”
“Nine,” the old woman muttered.
“Ten,” Alice Greensleeve contradicted. “After ten. I don’t sleep. I lie awake all night.”
“Nine!”
“I hear everything.” Her fingers tightened on the old woman’s shoulder, gripping like a vice.
“Nine!” the old woman repeated.
“If you like,” Alice Greensleeve agreed, glancing briefly at Cluff, dismissing the subject.
Barker wiped a film of sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. They could hear through the closed kitchen door the shrill voice of the old woman, arguing and protesting, the words indistinguishable. No one answered her. The sweat surprised Barker. He was colder than the afternoon warranted and not merely with the chill of the kitchen, which was little warmer than the garden.
Barker pulled his coat about him. He said, “I wouldn’t care what happened to me so long as I didn’t have to come home to that.”
They turned right out of the drive, Barker following Cluff’s lead, making up the hill not down it into Gunnarshaw. Clive ran ahead, relieved to be away from Greensleeve’s. Barker’s steps faltered. He thought he had been better off as a uniformed constable. He wondered where the glamour of crime had got to, the fights and adventures in the novels he read. He rubbed his hands together in a washing motion, as if a sordidness he had never imagined had dirtied him physically. Walking behind a silent Cluff a sympathy for Cluff welled up in him that he could not analyse. Cluff’s back bent and Cluff did not hold himself as upright as he usually did. He made full use of his stick.
Barker quickened his pace. He came up with Cluff. He asked, “Are you going to the cottage?”
More loudly, Barker said, “Shall I go back to the station?”
Cluff halted. His head came round slowly. He gazed at Barker, amazed to see him. The Sergeant considered for a while, reaching for coherence. Completely unaware of either of Barker’s questions he murmured, “I’m going home. There’s nothing to do but wait.”
Barker nodded. Cluff continued on his way. Clive looked up at Barker and went after Cluff. Barker hesitated, not knowing what was expected of him.
“Come with me,” Cluff’s voice came to his ears.
They passed the last of the houses, walking without speaking to each other. The road was familiar to Barker from yesterday morning. Yesterday morning was an eternity away. He remembered Inspector Mole’s fulminations about Cluff’s steadiness, the Inspector’s irritation at Cluff’s calm and apparent unconcern however important the event to Mole.
Barker wondered what the Inspector had to complain about. Barker tried to trace, step by step, the manner in which Cluff had collected his information, how Cluff had got to the point he’d reached. There was nothing connected, when Barker thought of it, in Cluff’s meanderings here and there in Gunnarshaw, no hint of a prearranged plan of campaign. The thing seemed to grow of itself, round Cluff, without Cluff really having anything to do with it. Marching with the Sergeant, Barker was sure that the picture in Cluff’s mind was sharper and more definite than the picture in his own. He felt a lessening of tension, a reduction of urgency. He found it quite natural that they were renouncing Gunnarshaw for the time being. What Cluff wanted to know would come to him of itself; he didn’t have to go in search of it.
Rain blew in their faces, clean, refreshing, icy. Barker lowered his head against the force of the wind. They dropped, after the level stretch past the last of the houses, into a hollow where a stream, swollen with rain, gurgled through a culvert under the road, and climbed again, higher, more exposed to the weather. The fields lay sodden on either side of them, occupied only by a few bedraggled sheep hugging the shelter of walls and hedges. They didn’t meet anybody on this minor road that led only to a succession of hamlets and farms. No traffic passed them either way. Cluff’s step was firmer. He let the rain beat on him, meeting it four-square, refusing to bow to it.
Jenet had the cottage to herself when they reached it. The cat gave them no greeting, disdainful of their wet coats, wary of their approach to the fire Annie Croft had banked before she left.
“Let me help,” Barker offered.
The constable, in the kitchen doorway, followed Cluff’s movements in the kitchen. The Sergeant rooted in the cupboards for crockery and cutlery. He investigated the oven attached to its attendant cylinder of gas, discovering in it a meat and potato pie large enough to feed both Barker and himself three times over. A pantry overflowed with pastries, yellow buns, Eccles cakes, apples buried in crisp crusts, tarts smothered in jam. An army wouldn’t go short here.
Gas hissed through the pipe from the cylinder. Cluff struck a match and lit the oven. He began to carry the crockery and the cutlery into the living-room. Barker brought a modicum of supplies from the pantry and Cluff sent him back sternly for more. The pie, beginning to get hot, filled the cottage with its savoury smell.
They sat back in their chairs, replete, Cluff’s waistcoat unbuttoned, big mugs of tea by their empty plates as conclusion to their meal. Dark had fallen and the oil-lamp was lit, soft and amber, a perfect companion for the blazing fire. No sounds disturbed them except those they made themselves, easing in their seats.
Cluff reached for his mug. He sucked at its contents. He said over its rim to Barker, “Which of them did you believe?”
“Is there any doubt about it?” Barker sipped tea in his turn, the killing of Jane Trundle a long way off, something he didn’t want to be bothered with just now, unreal and shadowy, not of any moment. He heard the gulp of liquid in Cluff’s throat. The heat of the room and the contentment of his stomach made him sleepy. He murmured, with an effort, the servant at Greensleeve’s house vague in his recollection, “She was old. She was ill. It’s easy for her to have been mistaken.”
“Or loyal,” Cluff said. “Without Greensleeve who’ll look after her, feed her, clothe her? Where will she find another roof to shelter under?” He got up from the table: “Bring your tea to the fire.”
Jenet, ejected from Cluff’s armchair, remembered her breeding and retained her dignity, expressing her annoyance only in the stiffness of her manner. She waited patiently for Cluff to settle himself, before jumping, as by right, on to his knees. He played with her ear and she shifted haughtily, coldly spurning an offer of peace.
“She’s going to make sure,” Cluff said.
They didn’t need to elaborate. There was a connection between them, fostered by the cottage, a telepathy that allowed them almost to read each others’ thoughts. Opposi
te to Cluff across the hearth Barker half-lay in his chair, his legs stretched out, Clive’s head warm against an ankle. His hand gripped his mug, its broad bottom resting on the chair arm. The chair was deep and padded and big. He knew at once that Cluff meant the wife.
“She wants him arrested,” Cluff added.
Barker allowed his thoughts to flow idly. He didn’t consider them. He didn’t grope for them. He wasn’t sufficiently interested to interpret them. He had no feeling about them one way or the other. The implications of Cluff’s remark floated in his mind. They knew already, he and Cluff, that Greensleeve had been farther that night than the streets of Gunnarshaw. The wife knew it too. Mud on Greensleeve’s car, the unmade surface of the track through the plantation on the moor spattering the car. Beyond the plantation heather reaching with its tendrils to the very edge of the road, heather sapless at this time of year, its stalks brittle, disintegrating into little specks of vegetable matter mingling with the mud. Tiny remnants of moor growth washed from Greensleeve’s car, stranded in the yard of Greensleeve’s shop. Minute bits of matter in the infinitesimal cracks of Jane Trundle’s shoes. Greensleeve going to his meeting, pursued by Jane Trundle. Greensleeve returning to his house at ten o’clock. The old woman lying, to protect her own future as much as Greensleeve’s.
“Separate rooms,” Cluff murmured.
Barker slid a little farther down in his chair. He was better off here. He didn’t want to be anywhere else except here. What must life have been like in that big, old-fashioned house, grim in its grim, tree-choked garden, the trees cutting off light and air, weeping around it? They didn’t sleep together. They went their own ways. Greensleeve went his own way: what way had Greensleeve’s wife to go? Escaping upstairs at night, before he came in, to avoid him. Greensleeve seeking the sanctuary of his own room, no goodnight between them, no contact, each hating the sight of the other. The wife lying sleepless, waiting, listening, peeping from behind the curtains perhaps. His door closing. The minutes ticking away. The wife, holding herself in, controlling herself until it was safe, creeping soundlessly, prying, searching, not caring and still unable to rest, looking for what small indications he might have left in his wake of his evening’s activities, twisting the knife in her wounds, feeding her hatred of him.
“A divorce would have finished him in his public life,” Cluff said. “We’re still puritans at heart in Gunnarshaw. Gunnarshaw’s half a century behind the rest of the nation.”
She couldn’t get away from Greensleeve. He couldn’t get away from her. He wasn’t willing to pay the price. He wanted his cake and to eat it too. When had he failed before? The ease of a liaison with Jane Trundle, the pleasures his wife denied, of which she was incapable. His wife’s money, the advantages of his connection with her family to start him years ago on his upward path. The balance-sheet of marriage, profit here, debit there. No divorce. A divorce not to be contemplated. Not by him. No scandal. Jane Trundle, perceptive, cold, reading him like a book, leading him on. Pay, and could he go on paying? A baby—
The eyes of the cat glared at Barker, narrow, green slits shading to yellow. Jenet watched him, suspicious of Barker’s unfamiliarity, Barker an intruder in the cottage, unwanted, alien. Barker lifted himself higher in the chair, jerkily. Barker asked, “But would she have gone so far? What was the need of it? Was she so foolish as to believe there wasn’t a breaking-point?” He meant Jane Trundle, not Greensleeve’s wife.
“Anything within reason,” Cluff said. “She must have known that. He’d have paid her anything in reason. She must have known. Would she have driven him to desperation?”
“Carter,” Barker said, sitting up. “Could it have been Carter after all?”
“Not Carter.”
Barker relaxed again. The room was too much for him, its quiet, its peace, its warmth. Let it be Greensleeve, then. He didn’t care. You couldn’t tell with people. He’d no business to be here, in this cottage. Cluff shouldn’t be sitting over there. They were here and who was there to disturb them? Greensleeve or Carter, anyone else, the old woman in Greensleeve’s house, Greensleeve’s wife, Margaret at the shop or Jean, men in Gunnarshaw they didn’t even know about. Greensleeve as good as anybody. Get it over with. Get it finished. Life waited. There were better ways of living.
“The hens,” Cluff said. “I’ve forgotten to feed the hens.”
Barker couldn’t tell how it had come about. He was alone, Cluff in the cottage behind him. A hurricane lantern shed a warm glow on a sack of corn in a shed in the back garden. He didn’t mind. He looked forward all the more to the cottage again. He dug with his hands in the sack. The hard pellets of corn pattered like hail in the bottom of the bucket. Wind lashed his cheeks. The flame of the lantern flickered. His shoes sank in moist earth. He strained his eyes into the dark, the hen-hut looming. He wrestled with a wooden bar holding the door of the hut closed. He jumped back at the sudden flurry of movement, wings flapping, frightened hens flying amongst the perches, wakened, hysterical. He emptied his bucket on the floor and refastened the door.
Cluff hadn’t stirred. The cat hadn’t stirred on Cluff’s lap. Clive lay in the same position on the rug. Barker, back in his chair, couldn’t believe that he had moved either. He didn’t think any more, not even unconsciously. What was there to think about?
Barker’s hands gripped the arms of the chair. He crouched in the chair, ready to leap to his feet, tense with an unknown fear, ignorant of its cause. Clive had gone. Jenet, in Clive’s place on the rug, licked a paw and washed her face fastidiously.
“Cluff,” the Sergeant said in the passage, identifying himself.
“You!” Cluff said.
Barker held himself rigid, staring at the open door to the passage. Time stretched endlessly.
The cradle of the telephone tapped, oscillated by Cluff’s fingers. “Hello? Hello?” Barker heard. “Are you still there? Hello?”
Cluff in the doorway, hat askew on his head, arms tangled in the sleeves of his Burberry. Cluff saying, “Get the car.”
“The car?”
“Quickly.”
Barker couldn’t remember seeing the car anywhere except on the setts in the High Street where he had parked it yesterday when he had driven himself in from the cottage in search of Cluff. He knew Cluff must have walked back last night after they had been to the yard behind Greensleeve’s shop. Cluff had walked into Gunnarshaw again this morning.
“It’s not here,” Barker said.
Chapter IX
Greensleeve, in the doorway of his shop, watched Cluff round the corner by the church. He saw only Cluff, not Barker by Cluff’s side nor Clive at Cluff’s heels. His hair was wet with rain, his neat suit damp with rain. He felt Margaret’s eyes on him, boring into his back.
He couldn’t see Cluff any longer. Across the High Street rain danced on the steps of the Town Hall. Rain blackened its smooth stone pillars. The finger of its flagpole on the roof stabbed accusingly at the low, dark clouds.
His gaze wandered up the High Street, down the High Street, his preserve for as long as he could remember, taking in its shops and banks and offices, its hotels, its old buildings interspersed with newer, taller buildings, flashier and more vulgar. It belonged to him, from the moment of his birth in the room above the shop. It was a part of him, the frame in which he lived and breathed, his kingdom, the extent and compass of his rule. The injustice of his case weighed on him intolerably. He felt, for the first time in his life, the fates against him. He was trapped, unfairly, rejected, without warning, by Gunnarshaw, this the end of his efforts for Gunnarshaw, this the thanks of its people, the reward they offered him. He couldn’t understand how the relief of yesterday had turned so suddenly into the hopelessness of today, the Indian summer of his escape from Jane Trundle into the winter of his unmerited overthrow.
He saw the High Street with new eyes, not his realm but Cluff’s. Contemptuous of Cluff’s abi
lity, he hated Cluff and he was afraid of Cluff, Cluff Gunnarshaw not himself, Cluff the moors about Gunnarshaw, Gunnarshaw Cluff’s ally not his, banding itself with Cluff against him. Gunnarshaw wasn’t Greensleeve, go-ahead, modern, properly appreciative of the age in which it existed. Gunnarshaw had deceived him, smiling on him only to withdraw its favour. The town was Cluff, sprawling, untidy, rooted to the soil from which it sprang, akin to the hills that sheltered it, wild and unchanged from the beginning of time. Gunnarshaw drowned in the mire of its own obstructive tradition. It clung leech-like to the past, spurning the progress that Greensleeve promised. Where else but in Gunnarshaw would he have stood condemned, driven to his ruin for so little a sin? Where else a Cluff, in these modern days, to hunt the spirit rather than the fact of a crime?
The man at the fruit-stall, Cluff’s friend, Cluff’s vantage-point, lounged behind the curtain of rain streaming from the tarpaulin that served him as roof. Even from this distance Greensleeve could not mistake the suspicions slowly developing in the man’s mind, peeping through the windows of his eyes in the chemist’s direction. The man’s wife was with him, farther back under the awning, but looking where her husband looked. Cluff’s friends, or Cluff’s spies?
The watchers he had imagined a short time ago, when he stood with Cluff in the rain, again obsessed Greensleeve. He was the object not of two pairs of eyes but of a hundred pairs of eyes. The windows on the other side of the street, the doorways to right and left of the one he stood in, were more than ever the refuge of his concealed enemies. Faces hid themselves behind the stacked tins and the pyramided packets in the grocer’s, between the suits and shirts in the windows of an outfitter’s. They showed briefly in the gaps of a barrier of shoes and boots ranged in serried ranks in a shop selling footwear. The owners of offices and their clerks dodged on upper storeys, camouflaged by the painted letters on the glass through which they looked, spelling out the names of themselves and the nature of their businesses.
He shuddered, cringing under their speculation, convinced that it was real. He could believe that they were surprised to see him, coatless, without a hat, wet, for once neither brash nor busy nor supercilious. He could not believe that they were sorry for him. He had no confidence in the protestations with which they had greeted him in the past. If they had been his friends their affection was meaningless, their friendliness a myth. They were on Cluff’s side now, himself betrayed, glad to see him defeated.