by Nina Bawden
‘For God’s sake, Jay,’ I said. I caught at his arm. He glanced at me briefly before he flung the boy away from him.
He landed on all fours on the pavement. He was whimpering and his nose had begun to bleed. The smaller boy helped him up and squeaked, ‘He’s all over blood. You didn’t ought—’ He faced up to us defiantly. He was about four foot ten, and plucky. ‘It was only a joke,’ he said.
I looked at Jay. ‘A pretty rotten sort of joke,’ I said. Then, shamefully forcing anger, ‘Get along with you, or I’ll tan your backsides.’
They ran off, the bigger boy limping and snivelling. Safely out of reach, they turned. The young one shouted, ‘Black bugger.’
Jay was shivering. I said, ‘You’d better get home. This won’t do you any good.’
‘I’m all right.’ He tugged a handkerchief out of his pocket. ‘We’d better clean up this filth.’
The brick was rough and scraped the skin from our fingertips. Jay went at it like a lunatic.
I said, ‘That’ll do. No one can read it now.’
‘Do you think she saw it?’ He was breathing hard. I could smell his sweat. ‘God damn them,’ he said quietly. ‘God damn them. The lousy little bastards.’
I had never heard him swear before. I said miserably, ‘They’re only kids. It’s understandable.’
‘Understandable?’ he said, in pure astonishment.
‘Well. Oh – I know it’s cruel – contemptible – but innocent enough, in a sense. Innocent of malice, anyway. I mean it’s natural, an animal kind of hostility. To them she must seem – oh, even to me—’ I stopped, ashamed.
‘But she’s human, Tom,’ he said, perturbed. ‘Not so different. You should’ – his voice shook – ‘you should look at her eyes.’
His own eyes filled with tears. He blew his nose, trumpeting into his chalky handkerchief. Then he said, more calmly, ‘I’m afraid it has made an inharmonious end to your visit. Next time I shall hope to entertain you better.’
‘You must come and see us. We must fix a time.’
He said evasively, ‘I’ll give you a tinkle,’ – I wondered where he had picked up that awful phrase – and held out his hand which felt limp and cold. ‘I’m sorry, Tom, if you think I behaved badly.’
‘I don’t think that.’
‘I shouldn’t have shaken the boy. It will have solved nothing.’ He paused. ‘But you don’t really think that what he did was excusable, Tom?’
‘No,’ I said. I felt that I had been forced to re-visit and live through a shame I thought I had long ago forgotten – at least in terms of full recognition and experiencing. Perhaps it was salutary. It left me numb and self-despising.
‘No, I don’t think that,’ I said.
Chapter Twelve
Later that evening, the telephone rang. Louise answered it. She put her head round the drawing-room door and hissed dramatically, ‘Do you know who this is? Reggie. My God – what cheek!’
‘What does he want?’
‘Apparently his Lordship is in London. And he can’t get into an hotel.’ She paused. Her face was red. ‘He wants us to put him up!’
‘What have you said?’
‘That I’d ask you.’
‘Then you’d better say yes.’
She stared incredulously. ‘Don’t you remember how he behaved last time he was here?’
‘Yes. But if he can’t get into an hotel.…’
It seemed she was indignant enough for both of us. I was able to take a broad, calm view. What right had I to despise Reggie? If he was prejudiced against blacks and Jews, I was prejudiced against midgets – and fat men. Prejudice was feeling, not intellectual conviction, and no one could help having feelings: all anyone could do was to control the expression of them. In this case, I could make a start by being hospitable to this fat man. I listened to Louise, talking crisply into the telephone, and enjoyed a confused sense of virtue.
She came back into the room and sat down, making it clear by her silence and her averted gaze that I had disappointed her. But she couldn’t keep it up. Finally, she said, ‘I suppose we could hardly refuse. But – my God!’ Her cheeks puffed out explosively. ‘If you’d been him, could you have rung up like this? Goodness, his hide must be thick as a pig’s.’
‘Perhaps it’s a kind of apology,’ I said, charitably not reminding her of her usual argument – that Reggie was so sensitive.
‘Nonsense. He’s never apologized to anyone in his life!’
I let her rant on, knowing full well that once Reggie arrived, she would be perfectly sisterly and welcoming. The truth was that she was instinctively frightened of Reggie. She might rage against him to her mother and to me, but when he was actually present, she choked up in the face of his stronger personality. She had never, to my knowledge, directly quarrelled with him; if they did disagree, she took refuge behind a display of timid femininity while she made absurd statements so wide of the mark that he could not possibly take them seriously. On those occasions she had reminded me of a squirrel chattering angrily from the high safety of a tree: she provoked, from Reggie, just that amused, benevolent response.
But this time, it seemed, her anger went deeper than usual. When Reggie arrived she was curt with him, stumping off to bed within the next half-hour. Reggie was taken aback, I think, though he had clearly been very doubtful of his welcome and had brought a bottle of Courvoisier with him as a peace offering. The nervous haste with which he produced this, holding it out like a magic charm almost as soon as he got inside the door, and a certain tortured humility about his whole behaviour – he insisted on asking my advice, though he must have known it was utterly useless, about certain transactions he was in the process of making on the Stock Exchange – made me warm towards him.
As a result, we sat up later than I had intended and drank more of his brandy than I really wanted to, while we discussed the Stock Exchange, the weather, the Government and Reggie’s chief financial worry at the moment which was that he was beginning to make a profit out of his farm. He blamed this misfortune on the fact that Shirley had insisted on installing a broiler house for the production of cheap chickens, but it was clear to me that the real fault lay elsewhere, in his own, inescapable efficiency.
Reggie, I thought, could turn a lost cause into a profitable venture, perhaps because it was not in him to admit the possibility of loss.
Later that evening, after a lot of brandy, I had a moment of fuzzy-edged clarity in which it suddenly seemed that idealism was redundant: the best form of Government for a sad, starving world might be by benevolent despots, archetypal Reggies.
Tempered, possibly, by assassination.
When I woke the next morning, Reggie had already breakfasted and gone. I had a throbbing head and a sticky tongue. It wasn’t the brandy entirely. My sinuses were stuffed to congestion with the beginnings of a snorting cold. Though my head was leaden the rest of my body seemed weightless. I floated into the bathroom, gargled, and looked for the aspirin.
After breakfast, I felt fractionally more human. My appointment with Kunz and his chums was for eleven-thirty. With luck, black coffee and more aspirin I would be able to face them though, as always, at this fragile moment life produced its minor frustrations: my good suit needed cleaning and there was egg on my best tie.
‘But you’ve plenty of others,’ Louise said.
In the jaded mood I was in, this remark seemed to point to the complete failure of our marriage, as far as mutual understanding and comfort in adversity was concerned. In a bleak, mourning silence, I went to the bathroom and tried to sponge my tie.
The telephone rang. Louise answered it. I heard her talking, though not what she said and then, with a sinking heart, the ominous clunk as she put the receiver down on the table.
She entered the bathroom with a stricken face.
‘Tom, it’s Jay. Not on the telephone. I mean – he’s in prison.’ And then, in exactly the same distracted tone, ‘You’re making it much worse.’
‘What?’
‘Your tie. It’ll leave a much worse mark if you do that.’
‘Couldn’t you have said so before?’ I asked coldly, and fled into the bedroom.
Thomas’s voice was lugubrious. He regretted disturbing me, regretted
it more than he could say, but my immediate aid was necessary.
He had called on our mutual friend at an early hour to make inquiries after his health, to discover that Jay had been arrested late last night and would be appearing at the police court this morning. He had left a message asking that I be informed but unfortunately no one had my telephone number. He himself had only managed to get it after a long conversation with Directory Inquiries.
‘What happened?’ I asked. I felt nothing, except a strong desire to murder Thomas.
Thomas was legalistically cautious. He had found no reliable informant, no actual witness. Only a Mr Chan who lived in the same house. He had been aroused by the noise and had a brief word with Jay before he was carried off by the police. Jay told him that a Mr Edward Jones had called at a late hour. Jay had opened the door to him because everyone else was in bed and Mr Jones had remonstrated with him about an incident earlier in the evening when, he said, Jay had viciously attacked his young son. Jay had denied this and said.…
‘I know what happened. I was there,’ I said impatiently. ‘Go on.’
‘Regrettably, the altercation became violent,’ Thomas said juicily. ‘After a short interval a number of neighbours were disturbed by the loud noise. Apparently Mr Jones was full of liquor and not to be restrained. Eventually some law-abiding person called the police who came immediately and bore them both off to gaol.’ His voice throbbed with emotion. ‘I fear deeply for my friend,’ he said. ‘I am certain, in the recesses of my own heart, of his innocence and good character, but will anyone believe a black man? Mr Grant, what will become of him?’
‘Nothing much, I daresay. Did he do any damage to Mr Jones?’
‘Mr Chan said that when he arrived on the scene, Jay was leaping upon Mr Jones’s stomach. Three men were attempting to restrain him. Jay said he was angered because Mr Jones had drawn a knife on him.’
‘Charming. But if Jones had a knife—’
‘He will deny it,’ Thomas said with conviction. ‘And he was complaining to the police officer that Jay had assaulted his son. It is well known that the English though scrupulous in many ways are prejudiced against foreigners. If Mr Jones’s accusation is believed, it is possible that the case might not be dealt with summarily. Jay might be sent for trial. Since he is African, he might not even be released on bail.…’
‘Which police court?’ I asked, resigned.
‘Brixton. Mr Grant, we will be most deeply indebted.…’
‘I’ll see you there,’ I said, and put the receiver down.
I turned to Louise. ‘Darling, get the car out, will you? While I find a decent tie.’
Her hand flew to her mouth. Above it, her eyes were tragic.
‘It’s got a flat tyre. And the spare’s no good. The garage said they’d be round this morning.’
‘For God’s sake, why didn’t you tell me last night?’
‘You didn’t ask – besides, I thought you’d be cross,’ she said miserably.
Rage swelled up inside me like an inflating balloon. ‘Am I an ogre?’ I shouted in a fine temper, snatching my brief-case, the clean tie she held out to me – one I particularly disliked, as it turned out – and ignoring, as I swept out of the house, her pale, upturned face.
The policeman at the door of the court was young and pink-faced. He looked as if he should be wearing white flannels and bowling a graceful slow over on some sunlit, idyllic sports day. He gave me his respectful attention, inclining one ear towards me with a stately affectation of being an elderly man, rather deaf. He was polite. No, there would be no objection to my giving evidence of character nor to my giving other evidence, if relevant. He would speak to the officer-in-charge. As long as I did not mind waiting. They always took the drunks first, then the remands. I could sit here on the bench until my name was called. Or I could go into the court if I liked, as long as I came out before the case in which I was a witness came up. ‘Though there’s nothing much this morning, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘Nothing sensational, if you see what I mean, sir?’
He spoke regretfully, like the manager of a suburban theatre envious of a successful West End run.
I sat on the bench, provided by what I now saw as a thoughtful theatrical management, and looked at the wall clock. It was ten. If Jay’s case hadn’t come up by ten-thirty, I would have to ring Kunz and say I was delayed. I blew my nose and the sound echoed back from the tiled walls watery and hollow: it was like blowing one’s nose in the corridors of a public bath.
There were other people waiting. A trap-faced woman with her son: a loutish boy with black-rimmed nails who jerked his shoulders angrily whenever his mother looked at him. Sitting next to them, a small, mousey housewife with a pursed-up, worried face and a drooping, grizzled moustache who clutched her shopping basket and muttered over and over again like the rabbit in Alice: I don’t know why, I don’t know why really I don’t, I don’t know why.… Her eyes were fixed straight ahead in a bleak, watery stare. No one took any notice of her obsessional chant except a middle-aged man in a bowler hat sitting on the bench opposite her and reading – or affecting to read – the Daily Telegraph.
He folded it with a rustle and a sigh; his eyes lighted disapprovingly on the muttering woman before roving very slowly round the whole room. I think, if they had not met mine, he would have peered quickly beneath the benches. He raised his eyebrow at me and twisted his mouth into what was intended to be a rueful smile. It said, clearly as words: what company, we of the middle classes are forced to keep! Then he averted his gaze modestly and stared at the tiled wall behind my head. His hands, which were narrow and rather delicate, pleated the Daily Telegraph into a concertina frill.
At twenty past ten, the mousey woman was called into court. She came out ten minutes later, looking startled and pink round the nose, but no longer muttering.
I followed her into the street. The telephone box on the corner was empty. I entered it, set down my brief-case, searched among my loose change for some pennies and then paused, the lifted receiver in my hand.
I hadn’t got Kunz’s number.
Nor could I remember the name of the hotel where I was due to meet him.
I think I must have stood motionless for several minutes, mindless as a basilisk in the desert; frozen, not by what I had forgotten, not even by the fact of forgetting, but because I had been swept back into an old nightmare.
Once I had forgotten – or thought I had forgotten – my mother’s birthday. On the way to school it had suddenly come to me that perhaps this was The Day – looked forward to, saved up for – but the memory both of the actual date of her anniversary and of this day, mysteriously eluded me. I was sitting in the bus. One moment that was all it was; me, sitting in the bus, staring out guiltily at the flat, Kentish fields and trying to remember. The next, I had a sudden, terrifying image of myself, alone in the empty landscape of my mind, a landscape seen shockingly clearly. It was a desolate country full of vast, frozen shapes, mountains and hills that rolled hopelessly on – I knew it – for ever and ever. Nothing stirred, there was no sound. It was a terrible place of loss and solitude and I was lost and alone there.
It was a country I revisited. Once when I was ill, once during an examination, and several times for no reason that I can now discover. When I thought about it – I could not think at all when I was there – I called it the Moon Country.
I returned from it – on that bus, and now in the telephone box in Brixton – feeling tired and limp. My legs were spongy, my head ached. I felt both ashamed and relieved. Stupid, also: it was ridiculous that a lapse of memory should drive me into this kind of fugue. I didn’t live in the Moon Country any more than I lived in the Land of the King’s Cows. There wa
s no real terror, no real sense of personal desolation and perhaps no abiding joy either, once childhood had passed. The world I inhabited now was a place where a lost telephone number, a forgotten birthday, were simply tedious irritations, nothing more. One might feel one had lost, in some deep sense, oneself, but the moment you felt it, it was gone, had become only words, an affectation. On a rising tide of rational assessment I realized that I probably had a temperature and that I could at least remember where I had left Kunz’s letter, making the appointment and giving his address. It was on the small table beside the bed.
Reprieved, I used my pennies to telephone Louise and listened to the bell ringing and ringing in the empty house. She would be out shopping. I put back the receiver and closed my eyes tightly as if I could squeeze the name of the hotel out of my defaulting memory.
It was a trick that sometimes worked. It didn’t now. The failure produced in me a numbed exasperation and a diffuse sense of guilt; because of Kunz, because I had left home in a bad temper that morning, because, staying too long in the telephone box I might have missed my call.
As I went up the steps to the court, the middle-aged man in the bowler hat passed me, clutching his brief-case and his Daily Telegraph. Jerkily striding, like a man in a cartoon, he marched off down the street. Looking after him, I collided with a stout lady in the entrance. I apologized and she smiled; she was the kind of old lady I liked, over sixty and plumply cheerful about it with a nice, well-seasoned face. She nodded towards the vanishing bowler and said, ‘You wouldn’t think it to look at him, would you? Forty quid fine.’
‘What for?’
‘Stealing sock suspenders. Two dozen pairs. He said he couldn’t think what came over him.’