by Nina Bawden
Chapter Seven
Celia’s voice was thin and distant and faintly unreal. She sounded not so much despairing as thoroughly bewildered. She had not seen Humphrey the night before; she had slept as soon as she had gone to bed and when she woke he was not in the room.
He was not in the house. The drawing-room smelt fustily of whisky and tobacco and the sofa was rumpled as if he had spent the night there. She had been puzzled but not worried, she had opened the windows and straightened the cushions and picked up the glass and the empty bottle. I think she had been concerned that the maid should not find them there.
He had come in when breakfast was over; she had heard the front door slam and his footsteps running upstairs. He had locked himself in the bedroom and did not answer when she asked to be let in. She had talked to him through the shut door, half angry and half alarmed, until he opened it. He was unshaven and looked ill; he had stared at her as if he were not quite clear who she was. She had asked him what was the matter and he said that there was nothing the matter and would she go away and leave him alone? He had waited, quietly and politely, for her to go.
She had not seen him again. She had not gone near the bedroom for some time for fear of disturbing him, and when she did, he had gone. He must have left the house almost immediately because the children had played on the terrace when they had finished their breakfast and they had not seen him.
Jennings had arrived later in the morning. She had asked him why he wanted Humphrey and he had told her that he had been to the station earlier and made a statement. He had told them all that he knew about Jasmine Castle. He explained, quite gently, that Humphrey had been asked not to leave the district without telling the police; Celia thought that Jennings had not believed her when she said that she did not know where he was.
She shouted suddenly, in a burst of panic so that I had to hold the receiver away from my ear, “Will, what is the matter? What has he done? Why do they want him?”
I don’t think, even then, that she realised what Humphrey had done. There was no point in making it clear to her. I have forgotten what I said to her but I know that I was as comforting as I could be. I promised that I would come to see her the next day and I told her to persuade Humphrey to go to the police if he got in touch with her. I think that I told her not to worry.
When I left the telephone box I had a moment of complete despair. Until then I had not realised how near Humphrey must have been to breaking point or that he was so entirely without courage. I had always thought of him as an exceptionally brave man; now it seemed that the standards by which I had judged him to be so were childish and illusory. Thinking like that left me with an odd feeling of emptiness.
I remember that I walked along the Embankment wondering where I had failed him.
I got to my club just before six o’clock. It was a fine evening, faintly cloudy in the sky, and cool. It was too late for tea and too early for dinner so I went into Park Lane and wandered aimlessly along the pavement. I turned down a side street into Shepherd Market, thinking what an unpleasantly self-conscious place it was and how much I disliked its snobbish little pretence of being a village in the middle of London. I went into the first pub I came to; it was quiet and hot and empty except for two men, one of them the man I least wished to meet.
I saw Piers as soon as I went in; if Piers had not seen me at the same time I think I would have gone away. But Piers nodded to me; the smile, in the heavy face, was bleak and unfriendly.
Piers had been talking to a man who moved away when I came in and sat, unobtrusively, on a seat against the wall. He was a quite unremarkable man, it was only an odd sense of familiarity with him that made me notice him at all. He was dark-haired with a skin that was swarthy in an unhealthy way and he had narrow eyes under a low forehead that sloped sharply back to the line of the greased hair.
Piers offered me a drink and the barman brought whisky for us both. I drank mine quickly and ordered another. I wanted, childishly, to get the taste of the drink he had paid for out of my mouth. Piers stood facing me, one elbow on the bar. He was rolling his glass from one white hand to the other. There was a looking-glass on the wall behind him and I could see the back of his fat neck rolling over the collar of his coat. He looked intolerably smug.
I had eaten nothing since breakfast and the whisky released all my detestation of him and gave me a kind of stupid courage.
I said, “Piers, are you sure you did not know Rose?”
“Humphrey’s little trollop? You must be slipping, William. I only met her once and I’ve already told you that.”
He sounded over-emphatic. I said, “You know, I don’t believe you.”
Piers smiled, quite amiably. He said, “I don’t see why you should insult me, William.”
I muttered, “Don’t you?” and felt, at once, like a rude, small boy. I said grudgingly, “I didn’t mean to insult you. I only wanted to be sure. I thought you might have met her somewhere and forgotten.”
He said, “Why should I forget, dear boy?” His voice was light and easy, his eyes as cold as winter stars.
I blundered on with an uneasy sense in the back of my mind that there was something that should be clear to me and was not. “It’s even more important that we should find her now. Have you seen Humphrey?”
“Why should I have seen him?” he said.
“Don’t you read the papers?” I asked. “He’s run away. He was scared of the police.”
He stared at me with amazement and disbelief. He said, “The bloody fool. But he had nothing to do with the girl who was killed. Why should he run away?” He spoke with a kind of incredulous certainty.
I asked the barman for another whisky. I said, “But he had, you see. She was blackmailing him.”
He said, “Dear God!” He was suddenly quite white; his face, for the moment, shocked into an expression of ordinary, human concern. It was the first time, I think, that I had seen him show any genuine and unaffected emotion. He said, in a whisper, “Why didn’t he tell me?”
I began to realise that I had been drinking too quickly. The room was not quite steady and my stomach felt queasy. I shifted my position against the bar and my foot crunched on broken glass.
Piers said, to the barman, “Clumsy of me, Ron. Will you give me another?” The man poured him a fresh drink and came round the end of the counter to sweep up the broken glass.
Piers said, “When did this happen?”
I told him and he listened to me without comment, staring at the polished surface of the bar. When I had finished, he said, “This is almost the end for him, isn’t it?” He sounded dispassionate, as if he were not really interested in Humphrey any more. It was almost as if he were washing his hands of him.
I said, “It isn’t the end, by any means. It looks bad, of course. He saw the dead girl, with Rose, earlier in the evening. He’s told the police that he saw her. He says he didn’t see her again. I think he was afraid that the police wouldn’t believe him. If we can find Rose we may be able to prove that he was telling the truth.”
He said, “Dear boy, are you sure that she can be found? The police haven’t found her. Are you cleverer than the police, William?”
He spoke in his ordinary, half-contemptuous fashion. He was playing with his glass, his small eyes glittered and he rocked gently on his feet. The brocade waistcoat was strained across his sagging belly.
I said, “The police are not infallible. And to them it must seem that he is guilty. He has acted as if he were guilty. We know he didn’t do it. It gives us a kind of advantage. God knows it’s all we’ve got.”
I finished my whisky quickly. It helped me to face the awful knowledge that what I had just said was true.
Piers said, quite gently, “Are you sure about that? Are you a fool, William, or only very stubborn? You haven’t been a very good judge of Humphrey up to now, have you? Wouldn’t you be better employed in working out some kind of defence for him on the assumption that he did kill this girl, rather
than chasing after the other one? Or do you see yourself as one of those engaging but unlikely gentlemen who appear in detective fiction? Really, William, aren’t you just a little vain?”
I wanted to say, “But it’s you, Piers, who are vain. Monstrously vain.” I felt suddenly that this was something that was tremendously important although I wasn’t sure why. I was aware of an, enormous anger. I wanted to hit his fat, red face and smash it into pulp.
I suppose I must have made some soft of aggressive movement because Piers stepped suddenly backwards as if to avoid a blow. Then I felt very ill. I left my drink standing on the bar counter and went to the lavatory. I was very sick and when I came back I felt sober and foolish. Piers had his back to the entrance and was talking again to the man with the unhealthy, dark skin. They were absorbed in each other. I went out of the pub.
The streets were crowded and the strolling couples had an air of summer leisure. The Park, across the road, was soft and green and sang with laughter,
I felt unbearably lonely. I stopped walking and stared into a shop window. A wax figure, draped in a pink nightdress, looked at me with a remote, sad air. My own reflection was imposed on the plate glass and it looked curiously, shadowy and transient. A sense of my own incompetence overwhelmed me; I felt a kind of panic.
I turned away from the window and called a taxi. I told the driver to go to The Odd Flamingo.
In the daylight the entrance to the club was drearier than I remembered it. The paint was peeling off the street door and the stairs to the basement were dirty. There was no one in the paybox at the top of the stairs and no one asked to see my membership card when I went into the downstairs room. The club was almost empty; the blank faces of the painted girls, perched on their bright, feathered bodies, made it seem trumpery and desolate.
The three men who made up the band were not playing but drinking at the bar. I bought a sandwich and a lager and sat down at one of the tables. The bread was stale and the beer warm but I began to feel better as soon as I had eaten.
Jennings had given me a photograph of Rose. I took it out of my pocket and looked at it. The great eyes stared at me, the mouth was soft and full and dreaming. I began to wonder if there was anything in the impulse that had brought me here; if she had come often, surely the barman would remember her? Or the band? They had their backs to me, presenting a solid wall of unapproachable black.
I had another beer and another stale sandwich. The man behind the counter was polishing glasses; the room was fuller now, but no one seemed to be buying drinks. The barman was a surly fellow; he listened with a kind of insolent inattention when I spoke to him and when I handed him the photograph he left a filthy fingermark on the edge of it.
He said, “No, I haven’t seen her.” His voice was final and sullen.
“Are you sure? She used to be a member?”
He watched me through his lashes. “Oh, did she?” he said. “If she was, mister, I’d have seen her. I’m telling you I haven’t seen her.” He was truculent about it. He gestured to the three men who made up the band. “Here, Stan,” he said. “Seen this skirt before?”
The three men crowded round; they looked at the photograph and then, slyly, at me. One of them started to speak but the big one, the one the barman had called Stan, chipped in quickly and said, “I’d have noticed her all right if she’d been here.” He sniggered loudly; the other two looked at him in what was somehow a furtive way and said nothing.
I took back the picture. I said, “I’m interested in another girl too. She …”
The barman said, “What’s your business, mister? The white slaves?”
The band laughed loudly. I thought there was an uneasy note in their laughter. Most of the people in the room were watching us.
I think I was still a little drunk. I said, “The other girl was called Jasmine Castle. She was murdered.”
The barman looked ugly. He said, “See here, mister. Are you trying to make trouble? Because if you are, we know what to do, see?”
The three men from the band had edged along the bar. The big one was standing very close to me.
I said, “I’m not trying to make trouble.” I put the photograph back in my pocket and moved away. The men made room for me reluctantly.
Then I saw Kate. She was sitting by the wall. She was alone and her face was turned towards me. As I went over to her, she smiled and said, “Hullo, Willy. I thought you weren’t going to speak to me.”
I said, truthfully, “I didn’t see you, Kate.” I found, standing beside her, that I felt uneasy in her presence. I fancied, from the set expression of her lips, that she was uneasy too.
There was a short, embarrassed pause. Then she said, “Well, now you are here, aren’t you going to buy me a drink?”
I said, “Of course. I’m sorry.” I went to the bar and bought two whiskies and took them back to the table. I thought, looking at her, that she had grown very handsome with the years. The narrow, equine face that had prevented her from being a pretty girl gave her a grave charm in maturity. She had lost the air of restless excitement that had continually possessed her and acquired a kind of serenity. I realised that she must be nearly thirty and that she looked her age.
She gave me a small, amused smile. “Do I pass muster, Willy?”
I nodded. “I didn’t mean to stare,” I said.
She put her hand up to her ear and pulled gently at the lobe with her thumb and forefinger. It was a gesture I remembered. She said, “Do I look much older, Willy?”
I said gravely, “I think you are a great deal more attractive.”
I think that pleased her. She smiled and said, “That’s nice. But it wasn’t what I asked. How are you, Willy? Are you married? Did you marry Celia?”
I shook my head. “No. She married Humphrey Stone.”
She said, flushing, “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.” Her eyes shone. “That must have annoyed your mother, Willy. Though I always thought that it wasn’t so much that she wanted you to marry Celia as that any woman would have been better than me.”
The embarrassment I felt must have shown in my face because she added quickly, “That was clumsy of me. I’m sorry, Willy. I haven’t changed, have I? Forgive me?”
I said, “There’s nothing to forgive. You were quite right.” And then I asked her what had been happening to her. It sounded, I think, rather stiff and conventional but I really wanted to know.
She said, “Very little, Willy. I’m not married.: I haven’t a career. Only a job and a not very well paid one at that. In fact I’ve behaved in just the way you might have expected.”
“Are you still painting?” I asked. When I had first known her she had been an art student; she had been noisy and opinionated and violent. I had thought that she painted rather well although I had known my judgment wasn’t worth much. I had met her at a party and fallen in love with her almost at once. I had, for a short time, wanted desperately to marry her although she was not at all the sort of girl I had always thought I would marry. I had been, at that time, on the point of becoming engaged to Celia; we had known each other for years and I had thought myself in love with her although after I met Kate I knew that this was not true and never had been.
I had introduced Kate to my mother and it had been a failure from the beginning. My mother had disliked her and made little attempt to hide it. I think Kate had expected to be welcomed with kindness if not enthusiasm; when this did not happen she responded to my mother’s frosty politeness with the truculence of a rude and angry child. Because she was hurt and because she had not yet learned to compromise she had flaunted the silly, unconventional ideas of the rackety set she belonged to, parading them proudly and defiantly as a peacock its tail until she had shocked my mother into indignant silence and departure. It was their only meeting; I did not attempt to arrange another. I was angry with Kate and, I think now, unsympathetic. We had the first of a long series of blazing rows in which I tried to make her behave as I wanted her to behave; how she would
have to behave, I told her, if she became my wife. It wasn’t until afterwards, when the final and most important trouble had blown up between us that it occurred to me that I might have been stiff and pompous and without understanding.
She said, “I haven’t painted for years, Willy. I couldn’t make my living that way and it didn’t take long for me to realise that I hadn’t the guts or the talent to go on. It was easier to get a job. I’ve had lots of jobs.” She looked rueful and amused at the same time. “I’m not a very admirable character, Willy.”
It wasn’t said for effect; she had always had an honest belief in her own worthlessness.
She said abruptly, “Are you happy, Will?”
I said doubtfully, “I suppose so.” It wasn’t an easy question to answer. I had never thought much about it. I had been content but I thought that that was not what she had meant. I told her a little about the way I lived and found that it sounded dull.
She said, “At least you do something useful. I don’t, you know. I’ve enjoyed myself, at least I think I have, but I haven’t amounted to anything.”
I said, “You’re not old enough to be world-weary. And you used to talk like that when you were twenty, so it doesn’t impress me over-much.”
She said indignantly, “I’m not all that young now,” and then she laughed at herself in the way that I remembered and said, “What were you doing at the bar?”
I said, “I was asking about a girl. Her name is Rose Blacker. You may have read about her in the papers.”
She stared at me. “The girl who is missing? The one who was mixed up in the murder in Little Venice?”
I said, “She was a friend of the girl who was killed. No one knows where she is now.” I hesitated for a moment and then I told her about Rose and about Humphrey. Her face was drained of colour; I thought that I had never seen anyone look so white.