by Nina Bawden
Her voice was stiff and unnatural. “Perhaps he was too vain to tell you the truth. It isn’t a very smart sort of place, is it? Besides, it’s almost true. He doesn’t go there very often.”
I said, “Did he know this Jimmie?”
The hand I was holding trembled a little as she pulled it away. She said, “Perhaps. I don’t know.” Suddenly there was hysteria in her voice. “Don’t ask me, Willy. It’s not my business. I won’t be mixed up in it.”
I said, “Kate, what on earth is the matter? What have I done?”
She had turned her face away from me and she was standing quite still. She shook her head violently. I thought that she was near to tears and it unnerved me. I said gently, “If I could help you, can’t you tell me?”
Her shoulders heaved and she began to cry in a desperate, silent way. The tears ran down her face and she made no attempt to wipe them away.
I said, unhappily, “I don’t want to dig into something that you want to keep private. But I must find Rose. It isn’t just because of Humphrey, though God knows that’s important enough.” I nearly said that she seemed the only worth-while person in the whole, sordid business, that if it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t be dirtying my hands. But I was afraid that Kate would laugh at me for a sentimental fool.
She said, almost with anger, “Willy, I can’t help you, I swear I can’t. Do you want to humiliate me beyond bearing?”
She sounded in agony. I felt foolish and helpless and suddenly rather moved. I took her in my arms and for a moment she stayed there with her head on my shoulder. I could feel her whole body shaking. Then she moved away and looked up into my face and said, “Willy, I swear that I know nothing that would help you to find Rose. It’s entirely a personal matter. You know, I could use a drink.”
She had put aside her emotion completely; her control made me feel useless and shut out because I would have liked to have been able to help her.
We went to a pub where there were wooden tables and striped umbrellas set out on the pavement. The night was cool. Across the road was the park and the couples walking among the trees. I felt a kind of peace; I think I would have been almost happy if Kate had not begun to laugh and talk with a strained and artificial gaiety, reminding me that we were strangers and wary of each other.
Kate drank a great deal and it quietened her. Her eyes began to look glazed and sleepy.
She said, “Willy, you’re very fond of Humphrey, aren’t you?”
I said, “Yes. I suppose he is my best and oldest friend.” I wondered why she should voluntarily open a subject that had seemed distasteful to her.
“And you do believe that he didn’t kill this girl? That he hasn’t got it in him?”
I said, “I have to believe that he couldn’t do it.”
She said, with surprising venom, “You see, if it were Piers, I shouldn’t find it surprising at all. He’s capable of anything.”
Her face had altered so that I thought that if I were to meet her now, not expecting to see her, I would not recognise her. Hatred is one of the most disfiguring of emotions.
I said, as gently as I could, “Kate, what has he done to you?”
She looked at me, faintly startled, as if for a moment she had forgotten that I was there. Then she said, “To me? Nothing much. Any harm that was done I did myself. It’s what he is.”
She hesitated, and then, in a voice that was slightly drunk and entirely solemn, she said, “I think he is the Anti-Christ.”
Her mouth twitched and she smiled in a white, exhausted fashion. “Sorry, Will. Boozer’s hysterics. I think I’d better go home before I embarrass you.”
On the way home, first in the taxi and later, walking along the embankment by the river because she said that she did not want to go home straightaway, I tried to find out why she had said what she did. It was without any success; she had sobered quickly and would not be drawn.
After I had kissed her good-night she looked up into my face and said, “Willy, I shouldn’t cross swords with Piers. It won’t help you and he’s a bad person to be your enemy. He is greedy and quite extraordinarily vain. It makes him dangerous, I think.”
There was concern on her face and in her voice. Her eyes shone in the lamplight; she had very beautiful eyes. I was suddenly quite painfully aware of how much I had loved her and of how wilfully and stupidly I had thrown it away. I was not in love with her now; there was only regret and an intolerable sense of waste.
I said, “Kate, am I to see you again?”
She smiled at me warmly and with casual affection. “If you want to, Willy,” she said. The politeness in her voice hurt me more than if she had said she did not want to see me again although I knew that I had no right to ask anything of her any more.
As I left her the bitterness and hatred that I had felt for Piers was as clear and newly-minted as the day that he had told me that Kate had been, and still was, his mistress. I remembered the smile on his face and the amusement in his eyes and if he had been there I think I would have killed him.
When I got to my club the porter said that there was someone waiting for me in the lounge. He sounded a little aggrieved about it as if he thought it was too late for respectable visitors.
I don’t know whom I had expected to see but it wasn’t Jennings. He was sitting there patiently, upright in a leather chair, his feet planted primly together. He got up as I came in and said, “Good-evening, Mr. Hunt.”
He looked shabby and tidy and tired.
I was suddenly and happily sure about what he had come to tell me. I said, “Have you found Rose?” I felt, for a moment, ridiculously light-hearted as if nothing else mattered at all.
Then he shook his head and looked at me in a surprised sort of way.
“I’m afraid not,” he said, and his face fell into lines of worry and unhappiness. “We’ve found no trace of her,” he said.
I asked him what had been done and he told me. It all sounded very cold and official and unhelpful. I asked him about The Odd Flamingo and he said yes, the police knew that she used to go there. He didn’t sound very interested; he listened with his good ear carefully inclined towards me when I told him what I had learned from Carl. He didn’t seem to be particularly impressed and I didn’t blame him. It sounded, in the re-telling, inconclusive and not very convincing.
I began to realise that Jennings thought her dead; he had spoken of her in the past tense. He told me, in the end, that they had decided to drain part of the canal.
I felt abominably sick. I said, “But she can’t be dead,” and he looked at me sadly with his nice, anxious eyes and said, “I hope you’re right, Mr. Hunt. I hope very much that you are right.”
I felt in need of a drink and I asked Jennings if he would join me. He hesitated and said that he wasn’t, strictly speaking, on duty, and that he would like a whisky. He was a trifle pompous about it as though it was an event for him to have a drink at all.
While we were waiting for the drinks he talked about the weather. He was very polite all the time and very unassuming.
Then he told me something about The Odd Flamingo that did not surprise me but rather confirmed a suspicion in my own mind.
He said, “That club. The Odd Flamingo. We’ve had our eye on it for some time. We watch all these places, of course, and there may be nothing in it. Some of the members are petty criminals—mostly small thieves and delinquents. There’s no evidence to show the place is up to anything illegal, you understand, but there have been cases recently when we have interviewed a man and found that he’s spent the evening he’s being questioned about at the club. Plenty of people to vouch for him and all that sort of thing. It may be quite genuine, of course, but it’s happened rather too often recently.”
I wondered what it was all leading up to; I thought it unlikely that he was just making general conversation.
Then he looked at the golden liquid in his glass. “It seems an odd sort of place for a man like Mr. Stone,” he said.
; I said, “You can’t be accused because of the company you keep. Or is it a new law?”
He said, “We aren’t accusing Mr. Stone of anything.” He smiled at me over his glass and I felt that I had been put in the wrong. His eyes were very bright. I knew why he had come to see me.
I said, “I don’t know where Humphrey is. I wish to God I did.”
He looked carefully away from me. He said, unconvincingly, “I am sure that if you did know, Mr. Hunt, you would persuade him to come to see us. If he has done nothing, then he has nothing to be afraid of, has he? But it is unfortunate that he has gone away. It makes it difficult for us to think him entirely innocent.”
He smiled at me again and finished his drink. I was sure that he had no personal doubt about Humphrey’s’ guilt but for the moment that didn’t worry me so much as the realisation that he believed that I knew where to find him.
It made me realise, much later, when Jennings had gone and I lay awake in my narrow bed, that I did, in fact, know where Humphrey might be.
I don’t think I slept at all. I know that I heard every hour strike. I was facing, I think, for the first time, the fact that Rose might be dead. Until this evening it had seemed an academic possibility merely; now, remembering Jennings’s calm, precise voice speaking of her in the past tense, I knew a kind of terror and despair that I had never known before. She must be alive. I found myself saying so, out aloud and defiantly to the still night. Because if she were dead, then the whole thing was hopeless and useless and I wanted no more part in it.
Then the light came and the sound of the first, sleepy birds. I got up and asked the night porter for my bill and got the car out of the garage.
It was a lovely morning, clean and cool with a slight sting in the air that suggested that the long heat was over and it was nearly autumn. I opened the roof of the car and drove fast along the clear roads until I began to feel a little less like a man in a nightmare.
I got home at about six o’clock. The house was silent and the blinds at my mother’s window were drawn. I bathed and made myself breakfast and ate it in the quiet, cool kitchen.
I went into the garden for a little while and then I drove down to the School. Celia came to the door and opened it a foot or so and peered out at me, blinking in the light. She wore a crumpled cotton dress and she looked hopelessly tired.
I went into the hall and she closed the door quickly, leaning against it as if she were barring out the world.
She said, “Will, Humphrey rang up last night.”
I said, “Where is he? Did you tell him to go to the police?”
She nodded. “He wouldn’t listen to me. He wouldn’t say where he was. Just that he was all right and I was to try not to worry too much. It was a local call and he must have been in a box because I heard him press Button A. If he’d been far away the call would have gone through the exchange.”
Her voice was husky and controlled. She ran her hand through her hair. “Would you like some coffee, Will? I want some. I haven’t had any breakfast.”
We went into the kitchen. She said, “The police came last night just after I’d spoken to Humphrey. I was afraid, for a bit, that they’d heard me talking on the telephone. They asked me lots of questions about where he might be. What will happen if they find him, Will?”
She was wandering wretchedly about the kitchen, a kettle in her hand. I took it from her and put it on the stove and lit the gas. She leant wearily against the table looking both distracted and spent.
I said, “I don’t know. It looks bad for him, of course. But I don’t think they can have much of a case against him until they find Rose. And I hope that when she turns up they won’t have a case at all. I want to try and find her.”
She said quietly, “Unless we find her there isn’t much hope, is there? But if the police haven’t found her, how can we?”
I said, “The police think she is dead’. I think she is alive. I’m going to find her.”
As I said it I thought that it sounded a stupid piece of bravado. She did not answer. I made the coffee and put the milk in a saucepan to heat. All the time there was silence except for the small, domestic sounds. When I looked at her, finally, I saw that her prominent blue eyes were cold.
She said, “Will, how can you? You don’t know how to set about that sort of thing.”
I said, “I know. I know all that.” I poured the milk carefully out of the saucepan into a blue jug. It seemed to help to concentrate on little things.
I said, “I think I’ve made a start. I’m not being entirely foolish.”
I tried, for her sake, to sound sure of myself and cheerful and I think I succeeded. She managed to smile at me and, in spite of her pallor and the muddy circles under her eyes, she looked a little less wan.
She said, “Will, there is one thing I don’t understand. If the baby wasn’t Humphrey’s, why did she come to me and pretend that it was? What reason could she have? It was a dangerous thing to do, wasn’t it? It was blackmail.”
I realised then that I hadn’t thought about that part of it for a long time. Perhaps because I hadn’t wanted to.
I said, “She may have thought that Humphrey was more likely to help her. She may have been rather desperate, you see. It may have seemed, to her, that he was comparatively rich and becuse of his job he wouldn’t want to be mixed up in that kind of scandal.”
I nearly added that it might, after all, be Humphrey’s child. That I had been almost quite sure, at the time, that she was speaking the truth. But I think that to have said so just then would have been an unnecessary unkindness.
I poured out the coffee and Celia sat on the kitchen table and drank it, curling her hands round the cup as though she were cold.
She said suddenly, “Will, Humphrey will lose his job, won’t he? Even if they don’t arrest him? I’ve been thinking about that all night. We shall have to leave this house. I don’t know where we shall go. Probably one of those horrid, poky houses along the by-pass. I don’t know how I shall bear it—leaving this lovely, lovely house.” Her face looked small and pinched. “Don’t be angry with me, Will. I know it sounds silly and shallow and beside what may happen to Humphrey it isn’t important at all. Only thinking about Humphrey is like standing on the edge of a pit that you daren’t look into because you know there is something dreadful there. So I’ve been thinking about the house instead and worrying about where we shall go and what we shall do. I’ve lived here all my life—first with Daddy and then with Humphrey. I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”
She looked so woebegone that my heart was stung with pity for her.
I said, “Dear, don’t worry about that. Not yet. It may be all right, you may not have to go.”
I knew that it was not true and she knew it too, but she gave me a thin, grateful smile. Then she said, “Will, do you believe that Humphrey killed that girl?”
It was a question I had not yet faced in my own mind because I had not dared to do so. That Celia should have been able to face it and put it into words made me despise myself.
I said, “My dear, how can I possibly know? I don’t think he was capable of that, whatever else he may have done.”
The tightness of her face relaxed and she began to cry. I comforted her as well as I could and tried to talk of other things. I did my best to sound more hopeful than I felt—I thought, when I left, that she looked a little better. There was more colour in her face and she smiled at me without effort. She stood in the doorway and watched me go, her legs bare and thin as rods beneath her cotton skirt.
I went to the office and worked for most of the day. It wasn’t easy but I had to get through the day somehow.
I had dinner at home and went out in the early dark. I drove out of the town towards the low hills and the wooded ridge that ran across country, level with the sea. The land was populous, stockbrokers’country, but the ridge had been very little built on. There was no good road and most of it belonged to the small local squire who had been an old
man when I was young and did nothing with his land except let the shooting and keep a few sheep. When we had been boys the ridge had been a paradise for us and the place of endless games. Humphrey used to stay with me during our holidays from school and it was one summer vacation that we had found the hide-out. I hadn’t been there for years and I wasn’t at all sure that I could find it again.
I left the car in a side-lane, hidden from the main road by the thick, summer hedges. I climbed towards the ridge, keeping in the shelter of the ditches that bordered the fields. The wheat grew high, almost to my shoulder, and the heavy ears cracked in the wind.
The climb was steeper than I remembered; when I got to the top it was nearly dark and the trees were black against a sky of deepest violet. I wondered if I would be able to find the mound from which you could see the sea. The hide-out was near it, a patch of gorse bushes below a rough, chalk track.
I walked along the ridge for perhaps half-an-hour before I found the place. I had begun to think that I would never find it when I stumbled up on to the naked promontory of chalky earth and in the distance, miles away, there was a moving light that might have been a ship.
Standing alone on the mound I had a sudden moment of unease. There was a little, moaning wind in the tree tops and the whole empty country seemed suddenly full of the kind of noises that you hear when you are alone in the dark and fearful.
I saw the track and the gorse bushes at my feet and with memory rather than sight I found the narrow cut that led steeply down between them to the earthwork that had been hidden by their roots. I tore my trousers on the grasping branches of the gorse and the spiky stems whipped across my face with sudden pain. At the bottom of the cut I was in what was almost a hole in the ground; it was a forgotten earthwork of some kind and the gorse had grown all around it and met over the top, shutting out the sky.
It was smelly and damp. I called Humphrey’s name and lit a match. The match spurted and blew out. I dropped the match box and as I bent to pick it up he said, “Hullo, Will.”