A Man of Forty

by Gerald Bullet

  Sipping Miss Camshaw’s sherry, he tried to attend to what Miss Camshaw was saying.

  “I asked you to come here this evening, Mr. Spencer, because I thought you might like to know how Adam Swinford met his death.”

  “We know that much, madam. He was struck on the head with a weapon which had something in the nature of a spike protruding from it. That spike entered the brain by almost the only available route. A very neat job, if you like to put it that way.” Spencer smiled grimly, looking round on the company. “ I haven’t asked you, Miss Camshaw,” he went on, “ where you got your information from. But perhaps…”

  “We shall come to that presently,” said Miss Camshaw. “ Have some more sherry.”

  “Thank you. But you’re not drinking?”

  “Forgive me. I prefer not to. I’m sufficiently… stimulated already.”

  “When you asked me to come here,” Spencer reminded her, “ you gave me to understand…”

  “ I’m afraid,” she interrupted, “ I was rather lavish in my promises. It was so very important that you should come? I even hinted, didn’t I, that I would produce the murderer himself for you?”

  Spencer was losing patience. “ And you can’t do any such thing, eh?”

  “On reflection I decided not to,” said Miss Camshaw coolly. “ I felt it would be in somewhat doubtful taste.”

  “Really, Miss Camshaw ...”

  Charles Ashcott, David’s solicitor, said quickly and suavely : “ I feel sure Miss Camshaw hasn’t brought us here on a fool’s errand.”

  “If she has,” said Spencer, “ I shall have a few questions to ask her concerning her own movements on the evening in question.”

  Miss Camshaw smiled patiently. “ Before you do that, Mr. Spencer, may I ask you a question? Have you got into touch yet with the man who called at Orkney House to see to a defective telephone on the evening in question?” Her tone put the phrase into ironical quotation-marks.

  “I can’t say we have,” Spencer admitted, with a shrug. “ The telephone authorities say that no one was sent. And the job, as a matter of fact, still remains to be done. If you have any information…”

  “Yes,” said Miss Camshaw. She was flushed; her eyes shone brilliantly ; it had taken more than sherry, Spencer thought, to produce that degree of exhilaration. “ I’m so sorry : you’re not smoking.” She handed round cigarettes. “ Or a pipe if you prefer it. Yes, do please. Let me fill up your glasses, and I’ll tell you the whole story as I see it.”

  They sat in a half circle, facing her. Apart from the preliminary greetings and introductions neither Stevenage nor David had yet said a word; but David was made aware now, by her curiously intent regard of him, that she was addressing herself as much to him as to Spencer.

  “There’s no need to spin it out. I’ll make it as short as possible. The man who pretended to have come to see to the telephone was the man who killed Adam Swinford. From the fact that he was disguised you may infer, if you like, that the murder was planned down to the last detail, though I’m not sure that I shall agree with you. It may be that he went prepared for anything, while relying, in the last resort, on the impulse or inspiration of the moment. It is quite certain that he entertained a powerful hatred—yes, something more than hatred—for Swinford, for reasons which you gentlemen may have some difficulty in understanding. I don’t think I need go into that, beyond saying that there was a girl in the case, a girl whom Swinford had seduced and betrayed.”

  The smooth narrative came to a pause. David, watching het closely, was startled by the sudden collapse of Miss Camshaw’s artificial jauntiness. He saw anguish and disgust in her eyes, in her twisted mouth. But with an effort, as if shaking off an evil dream, she controlled herself and went on speaking.

  “The defective telephone, as you know, was in the call-box on the first floor, Adam Swinford’s floor. The matter had been reported the day before, but to Stevenage, not to the Post Office. I know that because it was I myself who reported it. I knew Adam Swinford personally ; I went to see him, the day before his death as it turned out, to confirm a certain opinion I had formed of him ; and on my way out I remarked to Stevenage that the upstairs telephone was out of order and that Mr. Swinford had advised the Post Office of the fact. Stevenage was therefore prepared for the visit of a telephone man the next day. That’s so, isn’t it?” she said, turning to Stevenage.

  “Quite right, ma’am.”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Spencer, how much Mr. Brome has been persuaded to confide in you ...”

  “Nor is that of any consequence, at this stage,” said Charles Ashcott.

  “Very true,” said Miss Camshaw. “ And since, as I happen to know, he is entirely innocent, Mr. Ashcott, I’m sure you will have advised him to speak the precise truth. I was wondering whether he mentioned seeing this supposed telephone man.”

  “Yes,” said David. “ I’ve mentioned it more than once, but I don’t think they quite believe me. But how do you…”

  “The telephone man,” said Miss Camshaw, in level tones, “ arrived at No. 47 Orkney House just as Mr. Brome was leaving it. He was a quick thinker that evening, and this was a bit of luck he had not anticipated. To prevent Mr. Brome shutting the door behind him he said ‘ Just a moment, sir! I’ve come to see to Mr. Swinford’s telephone.’ As Mr. Swinford had no telephone in his flat, he was taking a chance. But Mr. Brome did not challenge his statement. Mr. Brome said c Oh,’ stared vaguely, and went off without another word. He seemed to be preoccupied and… well, agitated.”

  David leant forward in his chair. “ Miss Camshaw…” he said hoarsely.

  “Yes, yes,” said Miss Camshaw. “ But wait a minute, please. Let me tell the story in my own way. The telephone man, having effected an entry, proceeded with his business, which was, first of all, to remind Adam Swinford of his vileness, and then…”

  “And then,” suggested Ashcott, “ to teach him not to do it again, eh?”

  “Exactly.” Miss Camshaw’s face twitched, and she seemed to have some difficulty with her breathing. “ He did the job—it was ludicrously easy—and then walked quietly away.”

  “And did nobody see him?” asked Charles Ashcott. “ Nobody except… you?”

  “At the head of the stairs he heard someone coming up, and—rather foolishly, I think, but we must make allowances for him—he turned back and slipped into the telephone call-box, which he had just passed on his way from No. 47. The person coming upstairs was a woman. She was something over forty, I suppose. She had black hair cut in a simple bob, and a rather sallow complexion. The telephone man—forgive me for clinging to my little joke,” she said in parenthesis—“the telephone man had a bad shock then. For the woman went straight to No. 47 and, after knocking and ringing without getting any result, let herself in with a key. She went in and closed the door, but was out again before our friend the murderer had had time to collect his wits. She went past his hiding-place without so much as a glance. She was in a desperate hurry, and no wonder.”

  “No wonder,” echoed Spencer. There was a moment’s silence before he said : “ I understood you to say, Miss Camshaw, that this so-called telephone man was in disguise. Is there anything you would care to add to that?”

  She smiled distantly. Something of her former mechanical jauntiness seemed to return for a moment. “ I’ve always been fond of dressing up,” she remarked simply. “ Especially in male costume. I assure you I’ve had any amount of practice.”

  Spencer nodded. “ I see. Am I then to understand…”

  “Surely,” Edith said, “ I needn’t make it any plainer?”

  “Mr. Spencer,” said Ashcott, “ is probably wondering just how the, er, fatal wound was inflicted. This is not, you see, the first confession he’s had to listen to.”

  “On the mantelpiece in Adam Swinford’s room there is a bronze Phryne,” said Edith Camshaw. “ Or there was then. I put it back after cleaning it up.”

  Spencer seemed still unconvinced. “ I mad
e a careful examination of that article myself.

  “Did you? Then no doubt it occurred to you, Mr. Spencer, that the third finger of the girl’s hand, the hand which she holds before her eyes, forms something that might almost be described as a spike—your own word, I think. The thing’s contemptible as a work of art, but it has other uses.” She got up from her chair and poured sherry into the one unused glass. “ Help yourselves, gentlemen. I’m a little tired.”

  She was raising the glass to her lips when Spencer jumped up and took it from her. She shrugged her shoulders, smiling wanly. “ Dear Mr. Spencer! Wrong again!”

  With a somewhat affected briskness of tone, Spencer said : “ I’m afraid I must ask you…”

  “Yes, of course. I’ll be ready in five seconds, if you’ll excuse me.”

  Without waiting for his permission she went into the bedroom and shut the door. After a moment’s hesitation he decided to follow her, but the door was locked. Listening anxiously, he heard her move across the room ; heard the sound of the sash-window being raised a little higher ; and heard no more.

  § 7

  If you were to ask me—me, his maker—why Adam Swinford had to meet a violent end, I should be at a loss how to answer precisely. I cannot fall back on the plea that / didn’t do it, because in some sense I did do it. In a sense I, since I cannot escape ultimate responsibility for everything that happens in this small world of my making ; and in a sense David and Lydia, to say nothing of Eleanor and Paul, since I am at once behind them and in them all. For innocent though they were, David and Lydia, of the deed itself, was it not perhaps the pressure of their situation, the agony of the tension and the hopelessness of the deadlock between them and within them, that impelled, not them but me, and me not consciously, to invoke the Intervention of an external event, and do my novel a violence by escaping into that mood of garrulous exhilaration which the discovery of a corpse on the premises seems always to induce?

  Logically, their problem was insoluble ; and the irrelevant catastrophe has effected not its logical solution but its practical dissolution. For those two, David and Lydia, must turn now to each other for the comfort they can get nowhere else ; and because each embodies so much of the other’s past, and because only the past can give a momentary illusion of stability in a world of flux, there will be a sort of chastened happiness, at least for a while, in this new coming-together. It is true that so soon as they begin again to look to each other for ultimate satisfaction, which exists only in dreams, they will fall again into wretchedness ; but their capacity for hurting and being hurt will gradually diminish as the years multiply upon them, and resignation will set in, sweetened, let us hope, by the charity they are beginning to learn.

  Meanwhile—yes, they are happy, happy to have come home to each other, and to the sober satisfying prose of their mutual affection. They met, after Adam’s death, without dramatic flourishes. There were no emotional explanations, no scenes of reconciliation ; for each knew, at sight of the other, that they were reunited. And of Mary Wilton, so utterly is that spell broken, they can now talk, or not talk, without pain or embarrassment; and could do so, they believe, even if Mary had not decided, very sensibly, to pay a long visit to her mother in America. As for Eleanor, and as for Paul, neither has suffered irreparable harm; and both are young enough to look rather to the future than to the past.

  And now I must take leave of these shadows, with whom, and in whom, I have lived this summer through. Of my desire they were born, such as they are ; and of my substance they are made, and have no other. We, too, in our separateness, are but shadows ; for all desire is for the eternal, and only in time are we divided. As I in my story live and suffer in Lydia, in David, in Adam and Lily and the rest, so, in time and in us, in you, in me, in all living souls, that which we are sustains the illusion of being many and mortal.

  August 1939

  1 The War of 1914-18.

  Author’s Note

  The manuscript of this novel was completed a few weeks before the outbreak of war in September 1939. All my characters and incidents are fictitious, and in the passages concerning Adam Swinford’s business activities no allusion is intended to any actual firm or product.

  January 1944 G. B.

  This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

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  Copyright © Gerald Bullett

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