by Alec Waugh
He knows, he knows. He repeated it like a refrain, in tune with the throbbing of the engine. He knows. He knows.
He passed the cane field where he had thrown the wallet. What a fool he had been. Why hadn’t he destroyed it, burnt it, cut the leather, ripped the lining. It was the wallet that had put Whittingham on the track. But for that wallet, Whittingham would never have been given the clue. The wallet and his own behavior. All those slips of his. The Belfontaine Committee. How could he have known that. Wasn’t Carson, in his cups, the likeliest person to have told him. Carson had been in his cups that night.
By itself the Belfontaine Committee slip meant nothing, but taken with all those other slips, it formed a tally. There had been so many slips. That “afterward” instead of “after.” Slips that he hadn’t himself noticed. There must have been so many for Whittingham to note down in that filing cabinet memory of his. He talked about forgetting things, about being middle-aged. That was his blind. He didn’t forget anything he needed to remember.
He passed the cane field where the watch lay rotting. Why couldn’t the wallet have been like the watch, lying there hidden in mud, exposed to rain and sun. The watch, that was another slip that he had made. Referring to the watch before he could have known about it. One of his worst slips that. Every step of the way he had led and guided Whittingham. He knows. Of course he knows: but he can’t do anything, Maxwell reassured himself.
The sun was low in the sky when he reached Belfontaine. Sylvia was sitting on the veranda. She was wearing a white off-shoulder blouse. She rose to welcome him and he held her close but gently. She leant against him; raising her face, letting her kiss linger against his, fondly, deeply, tenderly. She sighed as she drew away.
“I didn’t expect you back so soon. I thought you’d be going to the club,” she said.
“Leaving you all alone here?”
“I’d have been all right. I’d have been happy with my thoughts. You mustn’t cut yourself off from things on my account.”
“I wasn’t. I was being selfish. This is where I want to be. I’m going to hate that Leg. Co. taking me into town every month.”
“Ah, darling.”
She had never seemed more beautiful. He had read that women lost their looks in the first months of pregnancy. Sylvia hadn’t. Her eyes were bright, her skin had a new gloss and glow: her hair seemed alive. He had never been more in love with her: every day, every night his love went deeper.
They sat on the balcony, watching the sun sink into the sea. She wouldn’t have a drink, she said, only a lime squash. She was cutting down on alcohol. She would soon have to give it up altogether. “But you have one, darling,” she insisted. “I’m not a spoil-sport.”
He sipped his whisky soda slowly, appreciatively. Six months ago he would have felt awkward and ill at ease, drinking whisky when someone else was taking a soft drink through a straw; he did not now. They talked, casually, with pauses drifting into their talk; six months ago he would have been embarrassed if there had been any pause in the flow of talk. He was not now. Was it not the ultimate stage of intimacy to be able to sit silent with another person?
“I never knew I could be as happy as this,” she said. “I didn’t know such happiness existed. I haven’t got a trouble in the world.”
He stretched out his hand, laid it over hers and pressed it. If only he could have said, “I too.” He ought to have been able to say “I too.” He had everything now that he had lacked four months ago. He was a member of the Leg. Co.: his wife miraculously had changed toward him: to be loved by a woman whom one loved, what had life more to offer. He had shaken a lifelong chip from off his shoulder. He too should be without a trouble in the world. If only there were not this shadow over everything.
But he can’t do anything, he tried to reassure himself: even if he suspects, even if he knows, he can’t do anything.
“I wonder if it’ll be a boy or if it’ll be a girl,” she said.
“Which would you rather?”
It was a question that they had asked each other every day. They had drawn up a list of names, sorting them out: one day preferring one name, the next another.
“I don’t really care,” she said. “I shan’t be disappointed either way, will you? I’m so happy there is going to be one. That’s all that matters.”
She paused and her eyes went seaward.
“I’m so glad we’re having one now, when we’re so happy. It must make a difference to the child.”
She paused again. She might have been talking to herself; except that they were now so much one person that when she was talking to herself, she was talking to him too.
“We’re lucky, more lucky than we can guess. I’m glad we didn’t plan it. Don’t you feel there is something unromantic about a couple saying ‘Let’s have a gay time for three or four years, make a love affair of marriage, then we’ll settle down and raise a family.’ That sounds as though … I should hate, I mean, to look at my child and think ‘that was the finish of a love affair.’ I should so hate that. But the way it is with us, feeling the way we do, it must make a difference to the child; our child ought to be something rather wonderful.”
Pauses drifted into her conversation. She skirted round the subject. She had lost all shyness with him now. Strange love grown bold had become simple modesty, but she had a reluctance, a hesitance to put her thoughts in words. “They always say, don’t they, that a love-child is something special.”
Maxwell closed his eyes. If only, he thought, if only … But even if Whittingham knew, what was there he could do. He’d no evidence. Not a shred of evidence.
4
“What are you reading?” Sylvia asked.
He held out the book. She took it and read out the title. “Crime and Punishment. Feodor Dostoevski. I’ve never read it. Any good?”
“Terrific.”
She opened the book. “H.C. Whittingham. How did you get hold of this?”
“He lent it me. We were talking about the way a detective could lure a criminal to give himself away. He said this novel gave the best example of it.”
“How did you get onto that subject.”
“We were discussing the Carson case.”
“The Carson case. I’d quite forgotten that. I’d thought of that as shelved.”
“It isn’t as far as Whittingham’s concerned. He’s hot on the trail still. Didn’t you read Bradshaw’s last article in The Voice?”
“Darling, I never read anything now, except poetry and sloppy novels. What did Mr. Bradshaw say?”
“He hinted that Whittingham knew who it was, but hadn’t the evidence yet, that he was biding his time.”
“Is that what Colonel Whittingham says himself?”
“He didn’t commit himself. You know how he is. Looks a silly old codger, but he’s a watchful bird.”
“We must ask him about it when he comes out on Monday.”
“We must.”
They would too, of course. It was impossible for him to be long in Whittingham’s company and not bring the talk round to it.
“He might be a little more forthcoming when he’s got the ‘old hag’ with him.”
“He might.”
Her voice was interested, but not more than interested. She had probably not thought about the case twice in the last two months. Yet her future as well as his was bound up in it. Oh, but so closely bound.
He looked at her thoughtfully. “Carson wasn’t a particular friend of yours, was he?”
“I scarcely knew him.”
He laughed. “It may sound curious now, but do you know I was jealous of him once.”
“Jealous? Of Colonel Carson? Why?”
“On account of you.”
“Of me!”
The astonishment was too utter to be feigned.
“It must sound silly now,” he said. “But in those days, when things between us weren’t so happy, I was ready to fancy anything, to suspect anyone.”
“But Colonel C
arson, darling. Why ever him?”
“Do you remember a day when we’d gone into Jamestown, it was the day of that party to welcome Euan Templeton. I was with my father going over the accounts. Carson came up to the house to see you.”
“Did he? I must try and think. Colonel Carson; oh yes, I do remember now. It was to do with the Belfontaine Committee. He had to find out what your father would really like. Someone in the family had to know about it. He did not want to ask your mother: it was meant as a surprise for her as well. He did not ask you because you were at Belfontaine. It wouldn’t be as easy for you to sound him out. It might have been apparent. So he decided to ask Jocelyn. He came up on a morning when your mother was away. I remember it very well because he had not expected to find me there. He looked embarrassed. He said to Jocelyn, ‘I know this will sound peculiar, but this is a private matter. Could I see you alone.’ So I went out of the room. They were alone together for about twenty minutes. She was very mysterious about it afterward. ‘Whatever you do, don’t mention it to anyone,’ she said, ‘particularly to Maxwell. I’ll tell you as soon as I can.’ She told me on the day of the presentation.”
“So that’s the way it was.”
“Yes, that’s the way it was and whatever has it got to do with me and Colonel Carson?”
He laughed, ruefully. What indeed had it got to do with her and Colonel Carson!
“It’ll sound ridiculous to you. It sounds ridiculous to me now, but it didn’t at the time. When I came back to the house that afternoon the house smelt of a heavy cigarette. Turkish or Egyptian. I wondered who’d been there. There were no cigarette butts. The scent was very strong in the lavatory under the stairs. The seat was raised, so that I knew a man had been there. Then you and Jocelyn came back. You didn’t mention your visitor. You must, I felt, have been keeping it from me deliberately, as of course you were.”
“But what made you think the man had come to see me, a married woman, instead of Jocelyn. That would have been much more natural.”
“Precisely. That was the trouble. If a man had come up to see Jocelyn, you’d have mentioned it to me. We’d often talked about finding her a husband. You couldn’t not have made some comment. You’d have said, ‘Frank Mason or Charles Hewlett was up here this morning to see Jocelyn. Do you think that would be a good idea?’ Something like that. But you never mentioned it. It was the one thing in the whole day you didn’t mention; so I knew it was something you didn’t want me to know. What else could it be but that a man had come up to see you.”
“Oh darling, how absurd.”
“But wasn’t it natural of me; we weren’t happy then, remember, not the way we are now. I was crazy over you…. While you—I remembered that remark of the French cynic ‘one loves, the other submits to love.’ And I knew, I was certain that you weren’t cold. Sooner or later you were bound to fall in love, the way I was in love with you. Then when Carson offered me his cigarette case at the Nurses’ Dance, and I saw that it had two kinds of cigarette, Du Maurier and Egyptian for, so he said, special occasions, I saw red. He was everything I wasn’t; the opposite of me in every way. I couldn’t go into competition with him. There was no common ground where we could meet. If that was the kind of man you wanted, there was nothing I could do. It drove me mad.”
“Darling, what did you do? Were you melodramatic over it? Did you forbid him the house?”
“It didn’t get as bad as that. He never knew, in fact. I hadn’t any proof. I was waiting for a proper showdown. When there was that talk of our coming into town and Preston running Belfontaine, I was torn between two choices; on the one hand it would give you chances of meeting Carson, on the other I’d have a chance of watching you, spying on you if you like, checking on your movements and on his, preparing for the showdown.”
“What did you plan to do, challenge him to a duel?”
“I hadn’t thought it out as far as that. I was in the dark.”
“I’ll say you were.”
She rose, came across to him, put an arm round his shoulder, leant her cheek against his.
“Darling, I’m touched. I’m flattered. I wouldn’t like it for you not to be jealous, but next time, angel, will you promise me, before you start working yourself up into hysteria, you’ll have it out with me.”
“I can promise that.”
Her voice was soft and there was in her eyes a loving, protective, almost a maternal look.
“I’d no idea you could work yourself up into such a kind of frenzy. How you imagine things,” she said.
5
How he imagined things. A state of frenzy. He had done that once; was he doing it again? The case against Carson had seemed such cast iron. No room for doubt, no loophole. And yet how easily the whole structure of suspicion had collapsed. Might not this present hysteria of his be equally a child of fantasy. What had he to go on after all? What had Whittingham said, what had he himself done to make him believe himself a suspect?
He reviewed the case. Whittingham had had the wallet in his hands when he came in. Why shouldn’t he? It had only just been found. Later he had a copy of Crime and Punishment upon his desk. Why not in heaven’s name? Why shouldn’t a policeman want to refresh his mind by reading a classical crime story? It was ridiculous to fancy that Whittingham had had the wallet on his desk to trick him into some admission or that he wanted to frighten him with Crime and Punishment, showing how the dice were loaded for the police. Fantasy, what else was it but fantasy.
What could be more absurd than his idea of Whittingham’s connecting his knowledge of the Belfontaine Committee with an indiscretion of Carson’s on that very night. How could that two and two have been put together? It was absurd, ridiculous; the criminal’s traditional hallucinations. Is this a dagger that I see before me? Don’t shake those gory locks at me! He had had far more logical reason for suspecting Carson than Whittingham had for suspecting him, and of what a flimsy fabric had those suspicions been composed.
“Do you think that you’ve a suspicious nature?”
Sylvia’s question cut so appositely through into his introspection that he looked up with a start.
“It looks as though I had, doesn’t it?”
“But that’s only on this one occasion, and you did have a reason. I wonder if you are by nature. We shall have to be on guard shan’t we, against our child inheriting our tiresome characteristics.”
“We can’t stop him inheriting them.”
“But we can stop them developing, or we can check them developing. We can look out for them. Environment is as important as heredity. If your father’s not suspicious, and if you are suspicious, it’s because you’d been brought up feeling you’d not been given a fair deal. Now that’s something we mustn’t let our child feel.”
“We must not.”
“And it’s very true what you were saying some time ago, that it will be very useful for him to have his aunt a peeress. He’ll have all those doors open to him when he goes to England. Isn’t it funny the way I talk as though I were quite certain that it’s going to be a son? You know on the whole I do really think I’d rather it was a son.”
A son, who would inherit his name, his position, his reputation; in whom would be blended his features and Sylvia’s: his character and hers; with certain characteristics of his own, individual, grafted, superimposed, the product of environment: and in twenty-five years that son would be sitting on this balcony, perhaps, wondering with his wife in what ways the child shortly to be born would be like his grandparents. His own daughter-in-law would perhaps be saying, “We shall have to be on our guard against our son growing up as you did. Your father after all …”
In what way would that daughter-in-law be wanting to guard her child against heredity. That would be the real verdict on himself, his daughter-in-law’s judgment of him. Was anything more important than to have his son say “If I can give my son the chances that my father gave me, he’ll be a lucky fellow.”
If only his son were to be able
to say that.
Chapter Twenty-Three
1
By the Monday evening Maxwell had only sixty pages of Crime and Punishment left to read. He looked forward to discussing it with Whittingham. He could see why Whittingham had lent it to him. It bore out the old boy’s theory, but he could not see that the lending of it need alarm him. There was no reason why he should not bring up the subject. It would be more natural for him to do so. You normally began a conversation with a reference to the last meeting. You said “We had a good time at your house the other day” or “What fearful nonsense old Bill was talking.”
He opened with the topic right away as he prepared the swizzles.
“I’m very grateful to you for lending me Crime and Punishment” he said. “I’d probably never have read it if you hadn’t. I’d have missed a treat.”
“I’ve never seen him so absorbed in a book before,” said Sylvia. “I’ve almost felt jealous of it. He’s been reading it every spare minute. I’ve had no conversation out of him at all this weekend. I shall be relieved when he’s finished it.”
“I’ve only another sixty pages.”
“That won’t take long at the rate you’re going.”
“Have you read it, my dear?” the Colonel asked.
“I haven’t, no.”
“Then you must. Don’t bother to bring it back, Maxwell, till Sylvia’s read it. It’ll make the time pass very quickly for her. Good books are so often heavy reading. This is more exciting than any detective story. I was told to read it by my first chief. He said it should be on the manual of Scotland Yard. Whenever I’m up against a ticklish proposition I reread it.”
“Was that why you had it on your desk?”
He nodded.
“I’d brought it down from the house a week before. I’d been turning the pages whenever I hadn’t anything to do.”