Where the Clocks Chime Twice

by Alec Waugh

  That was her story as she told it; quietly, sulkily, undramatically. She was a girl whom everyone in court had known since childhood, whose parents everyone respected. Not a word had been breathed against her ever, or against her family.

  I looked at Sybil. She was in profile and I could not read the expression of her face. It had been one thing to brave it out last Saturday. It was altogether different now. I wondered how Reggie would behave when his turn came to take the witness-box. His face was flushed. He was no fool. He knew that everyone in court was sorry for the girl.

  Sir Patrick sensed this atmosphere. His voice was urbane, encouraging; there was to be no bullying, no intimidation; he led the girl slowly through her evidence, step by step. He asked her about her meetings with Sir Reginald. When had she met him last. How often had she seen him in the last six months? He was one of the governors of the school. Did he visit the school often ? Six or seven times a year; indeed; and when he did, he usually exchanged some gossip with her? Had he ever said anything to suggest that his feelings for her were not strictly such as were correct between a man in his position and a girl in hers?

  It was obvious that he was going to point out later that, if Reggie had ever had any intentions towards the girl, the ordinary routine of his life would have given him ample opportunities of indulging them.

  Sir Patrick then began to question her about Reggie’s behaviour in the train.

  “You have told us that when Sir Reginald entered the compartment he said ‘Good morning’. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Can you remember his exact words?”

  “He just said ‘Good morning’.”

  “Is that all he said?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Was there anything unusual in his manner?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What were you doing when Sir Reginald came into the carriage?”

  “Reading a book.”

  “Did you go on reading?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What did Sir Reginald do?”

  “He opened out his paper.”

  “How soon after Sir Reginald had arrived did the train leave the station?”

  “In a minute or two.”

  “And you went on reading?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did the jolting of the train disturb your reading?”

  “Not very much, sir.”

  “But it did a little?”

  “Only a very little.”

  “Your attention was, in fact, concentrated on your book?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You took no notice of Sir Reginald?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You were not embarrassed at being alone with him in a compartment?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did Sir Reginald make any attempt to enter into conversation with you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did he do anything to make you feel embarrassed? Did he stare at you, for instance?”

  “No, sir.”

  “He read his paper quietly all the time?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There was complete silence in the carriage, that is to say, for some fifteen minutes?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “While you read your book and he read his paper?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And the first time that silence was broken was when Sir Reginald asked if he might open the window?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now I want you, if you will, to explain to the court exactly what did happen. You say he stared at you. Did he do this before or after he had opened the window?”

  “Before.”

  “He walked, that is to say, over to the window, then paused?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did he make any attempt to open the window?”

  “I don’t think so, sir.”

  “You mean he had not even put his hand on the leather strap?”

  “I don’t think he had, sir.”

  “Are you quite sure of that?”

  She hesitated, but he did not press her. “We’ll let that wait for a moment. Can you remember how his feet were placed?” He asked a number of questions on this point. Was Sir Reginald facing the window; was he, that is to say, looking at her over his right shoulder, or was he at right angles to the door; in that case he would be staring straight at her.

  “I am anxious to recreate the exact sequence of events,” he said. “Let us assume that this desk is the window and that these two chairs represent the corners of the carriage. Am I to understand that this is how Sir Reginald behaved?” Sir Patrick walked from the chair over to the desk. This part of the questioning took a little while. The girl hesitated, contradicted herself; finally agreed that Sir Reginald never touched the window strap at all, but as soon as he reached the window turned at right angles, facing her.

  “At right angles to the window, facing you. I see.” There was a smile on Sir Patrick’s face. It was easy to see the line of defence he had in mind. A large part of his defence would consist in his demonstration of the unlikelihood of Reggie having made such an attempt, at such a place, at such a time. But his chief line clearly was going to be that Reggie, a heavy man, facing the engine and consequently unbalanced, had been thrown forward by the jolting of the train, and that an inexperienced girl had been frightened by what had been a mere mischance. It was a possible if not a probable explanation. Whether or not the court believed it, depended, I presumed, entirely on Reggie’s behaviour in the box.

  Sir Patrick’s next series of questions left no doubt as to his ultimate intentions.

  “I am most anxious,” he said, “to learn the exact form taken by this alleged assault. I should like the plaintiff to show us exactly what she claims the defendant did. I think it would be easiest if she were to give a demonstration. Suppose, for instance, her mother were to sit in this seat here, then the plaintiff could give a demonstration. She must be able, I am sure, to recall in vivid and separate detail exactly what took place. …”

  He took the girl by the hand. He led her in front of the chair where he had placed her mother. “Imagine,” he said, “that you are Sir Reginald and your mother is yourself. Will you show us exactly what happened next?”

  The girl hesitated and there was a silence. Sir Patrick looked at her thoughtfully, kindlily, then turned towards the magistrate.

  “Perhaps, your worship, in view of the nature of this case, the plaintiff would prefer not to have the demonstration made in public. Perhaps we might clear the court. Perhaps …”

  But before the magistrate could answer, the need for him to answer had been removed. Suddenly the girl collapsed, falling forward into her mother’s arms, bursting into tears, crying out between her sobs, “He didn’t do it. … It’s all a mistake. … He didn’t. He never did.”

  Yes, I shall always say that Sir Patrick’s handling of that case was a masterly performance.

  When I met the Thaynes three days later, Sybil was at her liveliest.

  “I feel so sorry for the poor girl,” she said. “She’s a case for the doctor. It was pathological. She’s full of inhibitions and timidities, and then finding herself alone with Reggie—all the novels that she reads feature a wicked baronet. She lost her head and then she was frightened of admitting it. Perhaps she didn’t even know she was lying. The imagination of an adolescent can be so vivid. I’m terribly sorry for her parents. I’m trying to persuade them not to leave the village. They’ve lived here all their lives. I suppose Susan will have to go, but I’ve written to a school where Reggie’s got a pull. I’m sure they’ll be able to find a place for her. Of course we’re paying all the expenses of the case. But it is tragic for them.”

  There was no note of triumph in her voice, not a suggestion of vindictiveness, of resentment that her own name should have been dragged into a scandal; for she was sufficiently a woman of the world to realise that some measure of scandal would attach to
her for ever.

  “I’m so glad you were all in court,” she went on. “You know how it’s going to be. People always say that there can’t be smoke unless there’s fire; I suppose that the younger generation, who’ll never have a chance to get the facts right, who’ll just have heard backstairs whispers, will soon be referring to Reggie as ‘the wicked baronet’; of course one only had to look at the girl to realise that there couldn’t be anything in it, or for that matter,” she paused and laughed, “for that matter one only had to look at my dear sweet Reggie.” She raised her hand and gave his cheek a pat. It would have been impossible for her, we all agreed, to have carried the thing off better. And when we learnt later that not only had Susan Carter found a post in a school in Wales but had become the wife of the headmaster, it was generally conceded that what had promised to be a tragedy and a disgrace could not have turned out more satisfactorily for everyone.

  But that was in the summer of 1939; within a few weeks not only had every trace of such a scandal been washed from memory, but the whole way of life typified by Winchborough had been relegated to the past. ‘The power of “the big house”’—all such feudal survivals as ‘the Lord of the Manor’ and ‘the squire’ had become anachronisms. I have not been to Winchborough since. I heard sometime in late 1940 that the house had been requisitioned by an evacuated ministry. But the following September I was posted overseas to Syria, and in the vast concentration camp of the Middle East I heard no Winchborough gossip. By the time I eventually returned to England it was as a kind of Rip van Winkle to find that I had lost touch with more than half of my friends.

  That, indeed, is one of the minor tragedies of the war. For six years we were isolated by the particular kind of war work we were doing. It was like living on an island. By the time the war was over, our pre-war friends had gone six years in one direction while we had gone six years in another. There was a twelve-year gap. It has been almost impossible to pick up the threads.

  But melancholy though it has been to lose touch with so many friends, there has been, in compensation, the surprise every now and then of meeting an old friend in a totally unexpected place, and it very certainly was all of that to meet Reggie Thayne in St. Thomas on the verandah of the Harbor View Hotel.

  I hurried over. “My dear Reggie, what a surprise,” I said.

  He took my outstretched hand, but his stare was blank. He had not the least idea who I was. Which is another of the melancholy things about that six-year gap: you do not realise how much you have changed yourself until an old friend fails to recognise you.

  I introduced myself. “Of course, the writing fellow. Sybil kept telling me I should read your books. Never quite got round to it though, did I? You had McCartney’s, hadn’t you?”

  I hadn’t. But I let it pass. I asked him about Winchborough.

  He shrugged. “I couldn’t afford to keep it on. A place like that has to be run properly or not at all. And if I wasn’t running Winchborough, what was there for me to do in England? I couldn’t just sit around in White’s all day. Besides, England’s no place for a wife, washing-up dishes all day long.”

  “Where are you living now?” I asked.

  “In St. Kitt’s of course.”

  The ‘of course’ amused me. There is a certain type of person who expects his friends to be informed about the details of his own career at every stage of it, though he himself is completely indifferent to their doings; St. Kitt’s happens to be an island in which I have never spent more than half a day. I recalled it as a plain of canefields, backed by hills. I asked him how he liked it.

  “Grand. Just the life for me.” He had a schooner-type yacht, he told me. One of his guests was an American. That’s how he happened to have dollars to spend in a hard-currency port. He raised sugar and was trying experiments with secondary crops. He sat on the Legislative Council. He was clearly leading in the Caribbean a life of public responsibility very similar to his former one in Wessex.

  “Does Sybil like it as much as you?” I asked.

  “Sybil? How does she come in?”

  “Didn’t you say something about not wanting to have your wife wash-up dishes all the time?”

  He roared with laughter.

  “I don’t, but my wife’s not Sybil.”

  “You’re divorced, you mean?”

  He nodded. It was the first that I had heard of it. But then that was not surprising. With newspapers reduced to four-sheet dimensions during the war, only the most sensational cases had been reported.

  “Who’s Sybil married to?” I asked.

  “No one, as far as I know.”

  “How did it all come to happen then?”

  He shrugged. “The war gave me a good excuse: having to give up Winchborough, I mean to say. It made a break and the break once made. … I knew I never could go back.”

  I looked at him interrogatively. When I had come across to him, he had been in a group, but the others seeing that we were talking ‘about old times’ had moved away. We were alone and out of earshot.

  “You mean that you broke it up?” I asked.

  He nodded. I was astounded.

  “I always thought you were so happy.”

  “So we were till that damned case came on.”

  “But I thought she was so marvellous about it all.”

  “That was the trouble. She was too marvellous.”

  Then I understood, or thought I did. I had read once a restoration comedy called A Woman Killed by Kindness. This was that drama in reverse; the case of a man, or rather of a marriage, that kindness killed. Sybil had been too marvellous, too gracious, too forgiving. It was more than a man’s dignity could stand. … Yet if Sybil had been too forgiving, there must have been something to forgive; or at least Sybil had thought there was.

  “Then she didn’t believe your story, after all? She pretended to in public, but when you were alone. …” I checked. No, no. That couldn’t be the explanation. Under those conditions the question of magnanimity could scarcely have come in. Wasn’t there another explanation? Had Reggie really made this insane assault; had he confessed to Sybil; and had she accepted his guilt with a graciousness that he had found humiliating? Was that the explanation ? I waited, curious, expectant.

  He shook his head.

  “She never doubted my word for a single instant. That was what I couldn’t stand, living with a woman who just couldn’t believe that it would be possible for me to behave like that.”

  “Then you really did ! . .”

  Again he shook his head. “Was it likely—with a station only five minutes off! But when I got up to let that window down … it was a warm June day, there was a scent of summer in the carriage, she was wearing a loose cotton blouse. It was low cut. I was standing over her. She looked so cool and white and soft. It took me off my guard. At college I’d knocked about a bit. But since I married … well, that kind of thing dies down in marriage. I’d been completely faithful … that’s why it knocked me off my guard. I stared. She looked up and our eyes met. I could see at once that she knew exactly what was in my mind. Sybil was right, no doubt, about her being pathological. She was hysterical and inhibited. She stared at me, dazed, hypnotised like a rabbit with a snake. I had the feeling I could have done anything, any damned thing I wanted with her. I can’t begin to tell you what I felt. It was the most violent sensation that I had known for years. Then suddenly she screamed, dived across the carriage, and before I could stop her she’d pulled the cord and was screaming her head off through the window.

  “Yes, that’s what happened. But could I explain to Sybil? Could I hell! You saw how she behaved in public. She was just like that with me. ‘How tiresome for you. That poor silly girl. I wonder who’d be the best counsel to defend the case.’ She scarcely listened to what I had to say. ‘But of course you didn’t; no one who knows you could possibly doubt that, for a single instant.’ That was what the trouble was. I had learnt more about myself in those two minutes than in all the twenty years th
at I’d been adult. I felt I’d been a stranger to myself all my life. I felt I’d been living with a stranger all those years. But to Sybil I was the same person that I’d always seemed. I stood it as long as I could for appearances’ sake. But I couldn’t keep it up. My whole life was a sham. I was pretending to be something I was not. I couldn’t be myself with Sybil. I couldn’t help remembering that that girl in that one moment had read right into my very soul. She learnt more about me in that one minute than Sybil had in a dozen years. …”

  He paused. He looked away. He drew a long, slow breath.

  “I hadn’t anybody else in mind when I insisted on that divorce. I didn’t expect to marry again. But I knew that if I did, I’d want a wife who’d know without my telling her the kind of person that I really was or could be. I never knew I’d have the luck … but look, here is Diana.”

  He had risen to his feet and his eyes were shining in a way that I had never seen them shine before. A tall and youngish woman had just come on to the verandah. She was dark-haired, dark-eyed, with a dead pale skin. She must have been nearly six feet tall. She moved in a kind of glide—there was something of a panther’s quality about her.

  “Isn’t it nearly time that you were thinking of buying me a drink?” she said. Her voice was a deep contralto. It would have been hard to find anybody more unlike Sybil.

  3. ‘Typical Dominica’

  For A Long time I had felt curious about Dominica. I had been there twice—in 1929 and again in 1938. Of all the West Indian islands that I had visited, it was the one that I had liked the least; at the same time it was the one I was most anxious to see again; a contradiction that is typical of Dominica, whose saga is a long succession of inconsistencies.

  Every fact about it is self-contradictory. The third largest of the British West Indian possessions, it supports one of the smallest populations. Though its soil is extremely fertile, only a small proportion of its surface is under cultivation. Though it possesses in Rupert’s Bay a superb natural harbour, its capital stands at Roseau in an open roadstead. One of the loveliest islands in the world, its beauties are hidden for weeks on end by cloud. Its beauty has indeed, proved a liability. Its beauty is an effect of mountains, and its mountains by attracting rain have deluged the interior with such floods that no road has been built across the island and no road has been built round the island. Two-thirds of the windward coast is cut off from the capital.