Cushing's Crusade

by Tim Jeal

  A few yards away Charles stood pinioned by two men. His jacket had been ripped badly and his mouth was bleeding. Diana was sobbing. The man who had given him his glasses asked Derek if he wanted a policeman. He couldn’t think clearly.

  ‘For adultery?’ he asked incoherently.

  The man stared at him with bewilderment. He had moist-looking eyes, a neatly cut moustache, and was wearing a regimental tie.

  ‘For assault,’ he replied impatiently.

  Fucked the wife and assaulted the husband. Derek smiled but quickly relaxed his face. Any movement of his mouth hurt him. Diana’s sobbing was getting on his nerves.

  ‘Let him go,’ he muttered, pointing in Charles’s direction. The two men reluctantly did what he asked. They were clearly disappointed. Without saying a word Charles took Diana by the arm and led her away.

  Derek felt slightly sick; he started walking aimlessly towards the centre of the square. The band were having a break for drinks so he was able to sit down on one of their seats. A minute or so later Angela sat down next to him.

  ‘How do you feel?’ she asked, handing him a handkerchief which she had just dipped in water. ‘For your cheek,’ she explained.

  ‘All right,’ replied Derek, dabbing at his face with the handkerchief.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ll be asked to stay again.’

  ‘It seems unlikely,’ he admitted.

  The bidding for slices of ox went on.

  ‘Are you going to leave her now?’ Angela said.

  ‘Depends on her.’

  ‘What do you feel about it?’ she asked with unconcealed surprise.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He paused a moment. ‘Nothing. I feel nothing.’

  Derek wanted her to go away but the effort of asking her seemed more than that required to sit listening and occasionally answering.

  ‘That’s how I felt when I left John. It made leaving him a lot easier.’

  ‘A bang on the head doesn’t make much difference,’ he said. ‘No reason to leave her.’

  ‘And what you said to them?’ she asked with amazement.

  ‘They know what I know. That’s all.’

  ‘All?’ she repeated quietly. ‘It’d be enough for me. I left John because of a suit I hadn’t sent to the dry cleaners.’ Derek didn’t bother to reply. ‘No, really … he’d been about to go to a conference and was cursing away about his special suit not being there. He had six or seven others but it had to be the one I’d forgotten about.’

  ‘Tell me another time,’ he begged her.

  ‘I’d rather tell you now.’ She gave him an understanding smile and went on, ‘When he was stumping about in the bedroom, I went down to the garage and smacked a nail into one of the car’s tyres. I’d lost the key to the boot a couple of days before, and the spare tyre was in the boot. Are you listening?’ She fixed him with her cornflower-blue eyes. He nodded wearily. ‘I suggested he caught a taxi, but no, he was going to fix the tyre if it killed him. To get at the spare tyre he had to dismantle the rear seat and crawl into the boot; then he had to free the spare and crawl out with it. I watched him tearing at the seat and trying to wrench it out by brute force. He was scarlet in the face and gibbering like an ape. Have you ever seen anybody really gibbering?’ He shook his head. ‘Well I have.’ The memory made her laugh. She had put an arm round him and he could feel her long blonde hair against his uninjured cheek. The sight of her face so close to his brought back memories of the day before. He felt his penis stirring. ‘He was wearing his best suit; or it was his best suit when he started on the car. By the time he got the tyre out, he was soaked with sweat and had torn his trousers across the bum. Before he’d jacked the car up and taken off the bad tyre, he was sobbing with rage and exhaustion. It came to me on the spur of the moment that I never wanted to see him again; so when I’d got him some clean clothes, I went to the kitchen and left him a note: “You’ll find some lamb and some chicken in the fridge. Have the lamb this evening (twenty minutes a pound and twenty over) and don’t forget your mother’s birthday on Monday week.” Then I added that I was leaving him. When I’d woken up that morning I hadn’t any idea that I was going to walk out. I didn’t think about it. I just did it.’

  She was smiling at him encouragingly. Go, and do thou likewise. The band was returning. Derek got up. She took his hand and said casually, ‘You could stay at my place for a bit.’

  A peculiar falling sensation in his stomach, dread, sickness and expectation jumbled together. A frightening desire to say the right words while the flags fluttered and the sun shone. I’ll come, to hell with Giles, to hell with Diana. I’ll be out on my ear in a week or two, but what the hell? Easy come, easy go. Fuck the future while I can fuck you. She smiled at him.

  ‘There can’t be too many women who’d fancy your peculiarities.’

  A silence. Members of the band were picking up their instruments and tipping spittle out of them.

  ‘Can I tell you tomorrow?’ he asked.

  ‘I doubt it,’ she replied softly.

  ‘But I can’t just go without a word,’ he protested.

  ‘’Phone them from the station. Send a wire.’ She let his hand drop and shook her head slowly. ‘You won’t, will you?’

  ‘I have certain problems,’ he murmured apologetically.

  ‘Don’t we all,’ she said, turning away. As the band started playing again, he watched her disappear into the crowd.

  *

  Derek was in the pub trying to find out where he could get hold of a taxi when he saw Gilbert coming towards him.

  ‘I’ve been looking for you.’ The old man frowned. ‘What happened to your face?’

  ‘A ball intended for a coconut.’ Gilbert did not look convinced, but he seemed preoccupied with other thoughts.

  ‘I’ve been sitting in the church,’ he said. ‘Thinking.’ A slight pause before he added, ‘You ought to go in there. A good mural of St Sebastian’s martyrdom. So many spears in him he looks like a hedgehog.’

  ‘I had a slight altercation with Charles. Nothing very dramatic; but I think it’d be as well if we were moving on. You wouldn’t mind a few days in a hotel?’

  To Derek’s surprise his father showed no curiosity at all. He seemed relieved rather than put out.

  ‘Actually I was thinking of going back to London anyway.’ Gilbert smiled sadly. ‘The fact is I haven’t been entirely happy. A certain atmosphere from time to time.’ Derek nodded. He noticed that his father seemed uneasy and was fiddling with one of his coat buttons. They were standing just outside the main bar and people were pushing past them. Beside them was a phone on the wall. Derek, who had been looking through the classified phone directory for taxi numbers before his father’s arrival, resumed his search. Then he heard his father saying urgently, ‘I want to talk to you.’

  ‘Can’t it wait?’

  ‘I was planning to go back to London this evening.’ Gilbert sounded contrite but determined.

  ‘All right, talk,’ replied Derek with an irritated shrug.

  ‘Somewhere rather quieter?’ suggested Gilbert.

  ‘Anywhere you like, but quickly,’ moaned Derek.

  *

  He followed his father along a narrow cinder path that skirted the north side of the church. To their right was a large stone cross. Gilbert sat down on the plinth and beckoned to Derek to do the same. An inscription read: ‘This monument was erected to the memory of the officers and men of HMS Primrose, lost with all hands off the Lizard 12 March 1892.’ Derek rested the back of his head against the rough granite and shut his eyes. He could still hear the band playing in the square. Gilbert coughed delicately to get his son’s attention.

  ‘Those notes; the ones I lost on the train.’

  Derek looked at him despairingly. Today of all days his father felt impelled to tell him things about events of thirty years before.

  ‘Yes,’ groaned Derek, opening his eyes.

  ‘I didn’t lose them at all.’

  ‘Doe
s it matter?’ cried Derek, getting up.

  ‘I’d only been writing it all down to postpone telling you.’ The look of anguish on his father’s face made Derek relent. He sat down again.

  ‘I’m listening.’

  Derek found himself watching his father’s adam’s apple moving as he swallowed. The old man was obviously nervous.

  ‘The fact is I met Margaret months before I arranged for you and your mother to go back to Singapore.’

  ‘Did what?’ gasped Derek, all traces of weariness gone.

  Gilbert wiped away sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and added hastily, ‘When I said I thought you’d be safer away from England and the bombing, I wasn’t exactly lying.’

  ‘You just wanted us out of the way,’ returned Derek, as a cold numb feeling grew in his chest.

  Gilbert looked down at the cinder path, where a straggling line of ants was crossing it.

  ‘When you’d both gone, Margaret moved in with me. That was before the trouble started in Malaya. When the Japs attacked Indo-China I sent warning telegrams. Did all I could, you understand.’

  A sudden spasm of anger as Derek asked, ‘Couldn’t you have gone on keeping it to yourself? Was that too much to ask?’

  ‘Why does anybody want to confess anything? I needed to.’

  A strange booming noise had started, like distant guns.

  ‘We passed some granite quarries in the car. That’ll be blasting,’ explained Derek, seeing his father’s bewilderment. The explosions died away. ‘Just a point of interest,’ he went on in a flat unemotional voice, ‘when you sent me away to school, did Margaret move in again in my absence?’

  Gilbert nodded solemnly.

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ said Derek, staring out across the jumble of headstones. His anger had gone and now only the numbness remained. He remembered going to their local church with his father and praying together for his mother’s safety. Another occasion; a station platform, a woman who from a distance looked his mother’s double. He started to run only to see her turn towards him with surprise; a complete stranger.

  Gilbert got up from the plinth and said, ‘I’d rather you didn’t tell the others I’m going until I’ve gone. I’ll get a taxi back to the house and ask the driver to wait till I pack my things.’

  Derek expected him to go at once, but he stood where he was in the middle of the cinder path as if waiting for something. Derek waited too. At last Gilbert said awkwardly, ‘There’s something else. I meant to tell it you first but didn’t, and now it’ll sound utterly wrong.’ The church clock was striking the quarter. ‘Margaret’s affairs have been finally sorted out and it seems she was a good deal richer than I thought. I’d like to make over most of it to you, death duty being what it is. I had to tell you now because my solicitor will be writing to you in a week or so.’ He paused and went on quietly, ‘I intended to do this whether I told you about the other business or not.’

  Gilbert seemed to be waiting for Derek to release him with a forgiving remark. But by the time he could think of anything to say, his father had started off down the path; a badly dressed, stooping old man walking despondently away. Why, why did he have to tell me? Why when there was so little to be gained and a lot to be lost? But Derek knew the answer almost at the time the questions formed. That warm sense of altruism, that lovely contrite self-abasement that had urged him to confess, urged him to force what he had to say on Giles, whether the boy wished to hear or not, and he had made it very clear that he had not wanted to listen. Other memories; old, old memories. The moment his father had told him that he was going to marry Margaret. His reaction had been anger for a while, refusal to listen and then, very soon, acceptance. Acquiescence through fear: a conscious attempt to persuade his father that he didn’t care, and all because he feared rejection. And now, like some gruesome text-book case history, it was happening again. Giles refusing to listen, Giles angry and then saying he didn’t care what his father did. And Derek had sucked it up just as his own father had done those years before.

  Gilbert had reached the lich-gate. Derek called out to him to stop.

  ‘We’ll share a taxi,’ he yelled.

  Derek took his father’s arm as they walked across the square.

  Chapter 10

  After Gilbert’s departure, Derek tried to find Giles, but, seeing no sign of him in the garden or anywhere near the house, he went inside with the intention of packing. Since Charles’s car was not parked in the drive, Derek assumed that neither his wife nor his host had yet returned. He was therefore surprised, on opening his bedroom door, to see Diana hurriedly packing their cases. Derek said nothing, and stood waiting for her to speak, but she went on folding shirts as though he was not there. At last he asked quite casually, ‘Where’s Charles?’

  ‘Having his chin stitched up,’ she replied with exaggerated calmness.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ murmured Derek.

  ‘Oh you are, are you?’ she returned with bitter sarcasm.

  ‘I’m certainly not glad, if that’s what you’re implying.’

  Diana didn’t reply, but folded a final shirt and began straining to shut the bulging case.

  ‘Let me,’ he said, bending down and trying to flatten down the clothes in the case before attempting to close it. Without warning, she brought down the lid on his hands with all her strength, trapping his fingers. He let out a gasp of pain as she gave one last push before relaxing the pressure.

  ‘You could have broken them,’ he cried, rubbing his bruised fingers and then shaking his hands to get rid of the sharp throbbing pain.

  ‘I wouldn’t have been sorry,’ she returned, getting up and walking over to the window. A moment later she turned and said, in a voice shaking with suppressed anger, ‘I don’t give a fart for your idiotic suspicions, but as for blurting them out in front of everybody … I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you to mention them to me first before making fools of all of us?’

  Derek had expected grief, contrition, maybe humiliated anger, but certainly not this righteous rage.

  ‘You owe me no explanations, I suppose?’ he asked icily, sitting down on the bed. ‘Hurling accusations around isn’t going to help us understand each other.’

  ‘Do you think I want to understand you after the way you’ve behaved?’ She tossed back her head in derision and said in a simpering voice, ‘My wife doesn’t understand me. Just a bad gag, Derek; and, after what’s happened, worse than that.’

  ‘Do you deny it?’ he shouted.

  ‘My affair with Charles?’ She looked up at the ceiling, as though imploring help from above; then she sighed and shook her head slowly. The sudden and unexpected disappearance of her anger alarmed Derek. Now her expression was almost one of compassion. ‘My poor Derek. There was no affair.’ She let her hands drop to her sides and looked down at the floor. ‘I wanted a change, a fling, whatever one calls it, but he didn’t.’ Derek watched her with mounting anger as she took a cigarette from a packet on the dressing-table and lit it. She blew out a thin stream of grey smoke. Her look of self-absorbed sadness maddened him.

  ‘You’re an accomplished liar, Diana, but you don’t begin to fool me. Clever saying you made the running and he turned you down. Nobody likes admitting to that kind of failure and you particularly hate seeming pathetic.’

  She looked at him with the kind of sympathy he imagined the owners of dogs might show their pets when they had decided to have them destroyed.

  ‘But can’t you see, Derek, if I’d wanted to lie to you, I’d have made a proper job of it. Trying to be unfaithful’s not much better than being unfaithful.’

  ‘I used to fancy ladies in a certain kind of black lingerie but I didn’t rush out and lift skirts in the street.’

  She gave him a puzzled frown.

  ‘I don’t quite see the relevance,’ she said gently.

  It doesn’t matter,’ he replied brusquely. ‘If he turned you down, what the hell were you doing arranging a holiday for yours
elf here?’

  ‘A last try.’ She shrugged her shoulders and looked away. ‘But you put paid to that by coming. Charles wanted you to come, so he wasn’t sorry.’

  Derek came up close to her. ‘Let’s try something a bit more tangible.’

  ‘There’s no point,’ she whispered with desperate sympathy.

  ‘I think I can judge that.’ He paused and went on sharply. ‘When he came to the flat that afternoon, you were in your dressing-gown.’

  She gave him a sad ironic smile and said slowly, as though explaining to a difficult child, ‘I’d been in bed with a headache. Remember? I hadn’t got dressed. I’d also had a bath.’

  ‘I’ll get the truth out of you. Your headache went pretty quickly after he’d gone.’

  ‘I’d been in bed most of the day; taken some pills. Headaches come and go. So?’ Her calmness seemed too calculated to be genuine. Normally Diana would have told him to go to hell and leave her alone.

  ‘You didn’t answer the phone when I rang,’ he said.

  She raised her hands and replied with the hint of a smile, ‘Do you get out of the bath to answer it?’

  ‘I phoned several times.’

  She sat down on a case and put her head in her hands. Then she looked up wearily. ‘It’s weeks ago, Derek. I slept most of the morning. I must have turned off the extension by the bed. I can’t remember turning it off, but I obviously did. If I’d heard the bell why on earth would I have let it ring?’

  ‘You had an appointment at the dentist,’ said Derek forcefully, sensing that he had trapped her. ‘If you answered the phone your bogus Indian dentist went up the spout. That’s why you let it ring.’

  ‘But I had a headache,’ she cried, with real irritation. ‘Can’t you listen?’

  ‘And on the day you had a headache, you happened to have a dental appointment and Charles happened to drop by. It also just happened to be the day Giles usually went swimming after school.’