At the Dark Hour

by John Wilson

  – Has Mr Falling been here before?

  – Oh yes. He’s a regular.

  – Does he always come with a woman?

  – Yes sir.

  – And is it always the same woman?

  – Yes sir. Every time.

  – What’s her name?

  – Betty.

  – Why hasn’t she signed in?

  – He’s the one with the money, sir.

  – Right! Well, thank you very much. I’ll be off. Many thanks. And Merry Christmas.

  – And a happy Christmas to you too, sir.

  ****

  The old man watched as the corpulent man shambled out of the hotel, his large hat drooping down over his head. Thirty bob! Not bad for a few minutes’ work. He looked at the red banknote and then put in his pocket with the green one given to him by Adam.

  Chapter Twenty

  (Monday 23rd December 1940)

  Betty could tell that it was his first time. Something about his hesitancy, the way he had approached, speaking with the other girls on the way. He had seemed interested in the whole way that she looked, and that was telling. Men usually only wanted one part of her – and that didn’t show easily through her clothing. He was particularly interested in her clothing. It may well have been that he would have passed her by as he had the others but for an altercation down in the street behind them. That seemed to galvanise him into making a choice.

  She did not have the luxury of choice and would have turned him away if she had. Painfully thin and in a coat that was too big for him. And he was carrying a cat in a cage, and a straw hat. She could not make out his features. She could see his money, though, and there was a lot more of it in his wallet. She sensed the beginning of a lucrative franchise. But things had taken an odd turn: she had a perfectly serviceable room to take him to but he had insisted that they go to a hotel. Then, having installed her in a room, he had disappeared off again back to the concierge leaving her with a newly liberated black and white kitten. Returning he had told her that he’d been to order some tea, with extra milk, some Dundee cake and a large jug of water.

  It was definitely his first time. Such men, she knew, wanted to talk about their lives and their families before getting down to business. The tea, cake and water had arrived before conversation had really started between them and he immediately drank back the water and began devouring the cake. There was a jug of real milk to go with the tea and he placed far too much of this in a saucer to give to the kitten. Real milk! Somehow, over her outrage, she began to warm to him. Then he offered her a cup of tea. She knew he was going to ask her about herself. It was, after all, the first time. So she was ready.

  – I’m a seamstress.

  – I was attracted to you by your clothes. They’re well cut.

  – Shoddy material though.

  – But well cut.

  She looked at him properly for the first time. It was his eyes: dark hollows lay beneath them … and crow’s feet … and there were blood lines across the veins. But they were so blue. Piercing and blue. And somehow calm.

  – How long have you been doing this?

  – None of your business.

  – No. But how long? It’s important to me.

  – Why?

  – Please. Answer me. Trust me.

  She saw a tremor in his left hand and he began coughing. His handkerchief was thick with blood.

  – How long have you been doing this?

  – Since September.

  – Have you given up as a seamstress?

  – Not much call for it now.

  – Why did you start?

  – Money. I need the money.

  After his eyes it was his voice. It was cultured and mellifluous. Later, when she thought back on it she would say it was mesmerising. She was not surprised when the dailies confirmed that he really was a barrister. There was a persuasive vulnerability about him.

  – Why do you need the money?

  – The bloody war.

  – What happened?

  – A bloody bomb fell on us. Killed my mum and dad. Killed my husband.

  – I’m sorry.

  – So I’ve got no home and no one to support me. And so here I am. Can we get on please?

  – What did your husband do?

  – He was home on leave. Survived Dunkirk! I thought it was a bloody miracle. He should have stayed at the front.

  – Listen, I –

  – It wasn’t as though Joe hadn’t tried to provide for us. Took out an insurance policy on his life. Didn’t cover enemy action though. And so that was that.

  – Look … I’m sorry but –

  – Or was it Act of God? Interesting, these policy exclusions, aren’t they?

  She sensed, belatedly, that he was trying to say something and so she shut up.

  – Listen, I’ve paid you thirty shillings to be with me now and we both know that is a lot of money.

  – An awful lot of money for just talking!

  – That’s all I want to do. But I have something important to ask of you.

  – Look, I don’t want to get involved with anyone. Certainly not a punter.

  She was beginning to feel nervous. He was clearly deranged, for all his fine language. He was reaching into his jacket again. He pulled out his wallet and then removed some notes from it.

  – Look. Ten pounds. It could be yours.

  – I don’t want any funny stuff you know. Here’s your money back. I want to go home. Leave me alone.

  – When you leave here you will be followed.

  Betty was becoming very scared and her accent started to slip.

  – Are you a spy or sumfink?

  The kitten was playing with the edges of the curtains and jumping and pouncing on imaginary prey.

  – I’m not a spy. But I need your help.

  – Ten pounds?

  – When you leave here you will be followed. But don’t worry. He’s a fat, hopeless detective who’s trying to catch me in bed with his boss’s wife. All I need you to tell him is that you have been coming with me here since May.

  – I only started in September!

  – A small expansion on the lie.

  He waved the notes at her in a way that was more pleading than perfunctory. His voice was calm and controlling. It made her relax.

  – That’s it. I give you ten pounds and you tell some little lies. Will you do it?

  She looked again at the money. It was very inviting.

  – That’s all I have to do?

  – That’s all you have to do.

  – All right then.

  He reached over to her with the money and placed it in her hand. She made to take it but he held on.

  – There’s one added condition?

  She knew it.

  – What’s that then?

  – There is a possibility that the fat man’s boss will take me to court over his wife. If he does that I’ll need you to repeat to a court what you tell the fat man. It probably won’t happen. But if it does you’ll have to give evidence.

  – It’s one thing to lie to this fat man. It’s another to swear on the bible!

  His voice was like velvet:

  – I do understand. If it comes to that I’ll give you another ten pounds. Do we have a deal?

  He was still holding onto the notes as they sat in her hand. She was uncertain, but she felt that she could trust him.

  – All right. You have a deal. But it isn’t going to come to court is it?

  – I’m almost certain.

  He let go of the notes.

  – Now. I need to know all about you. And you need to know something about me. We both need to be ready to answer any questions that are asked …

  And for the next surreal hour they talked like young lovers – committing as much to memory as they could and creating a past for themselves. She learnt then that he was a barrister. That he had a degree from Cambridge and lived in south London with his wife and that they had a daughter
of twelve called Deborah who was in Edenbridge for the duration. She learnt of his affair with Julia (though he held back her name), and the nemesis that was heading for him. He in turn learnt that she was from Islington, that Joe had been an electrician who had joined up and went with the BEF before being successfully brought back. That they had been living with her parents when the bomb blasted everything away. They had had no children. He had her address and a telephone number. When an hour had passed Adam allowed her to leave, giving her a description as she went of the private detective who, he had little doubt, would be waiting outside. As she left the hotel room she looked back on the funny thin man on the bed, his overcoat still on him, as he played with the black and white kitten; and she thought – to her surprise – that she would not have minded making love to him.

  ****

  A similar thought had passed through Adam’s mind as she closed the door behind her. But he was utterly incapable of the act. His innards felt like loose molasses and churned on internal tides within him. Waves of nausea had been sweeping across him with growing frequency as the day progressed and in the quiet moments when he stopped to think what he was doing. His chest had a double wheeze now and he felt his body whistling at him. He took out his handkerchief and re-folded it – trying to make it look white again – then looked back on his day: he had bribed a council official, picked up a prostitute, bribed a hotel clerk and finally bribed the prostitute and persuaded her to join him in a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. And it was only six in the evening. Worse than that, he had created an alternative truth that would reflect more badly on him than the reality. It would probably end his marriage. The only person it helped was Julia, who would not even speak to him now.

  Why had he chosen Betty? The cut of her clothes had been important. He didn’t know how difficult it might be to take someone off the street and into the Stafford. And she was pretty, in a girlish way, and blonde. He thought it might help in the long run if she were to be blonde. The racket Jackson was creating further down White Horse Street had helped him make his final choice.

  He thought again of Julia: there had been no note in the church when he returned from Romford. She had taken the one he left there but had not replaced it with one of her own. He had originally intended to write only two words but he couldn’t prevent himself from continuing. It would mean nothing to her, of course, and would probably just irritate. But he had to say it one last time. He put the kitten back in its cage and made to leave the hotel. Sometime over the course of the next few days he was going to have to tell Catherine that he frequented prostitutes and was going to be Co-Respondent in an unrelated action brought against him by his Head of Chambers. Christmas was unlikely to be happy this year.

  ****

  Julia kept a bowl of hyacinths in the window of her dressing room. During the day they were framed by views of Eaton Square but now the blackout shades had come down. She unfolded the note and read it again:

  “TRUST ME”

  And then, in much smaller, more hesitant writing:

  “I love you.”

  She folded and unfolded it and then reached for the Swan Vestas. She should burn it. “Destroy this.” But she read it again and told herself that the smell of smoke would be equally incriminating. She folded it up again, went over to the window and nipped a hyacinth between finger and thumb, just above the bulb, pulling it from its pot. Then she placed the folded piece of paper deep in the bowl, replaced the bulb and tamped down the soil.

  There would have been many other ways to get rid of the note but for some reason she chose to keep it.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  (Tuesday 24th December 1940)

  “The war brought this to a head.”

  Catherine stood before the mirror and examined her eyes. The reflection of an oil lamp on the dresser behind her glowed and gave the glass a golden edge; her face a coppery chiaroscuro. Dusk was falling. She had good eyes, dark and brown with flecks of gold. Her mother’s eyes. She thought of her mother’s eyes in those last days: how the depth went out of them and the gleam in them died. The colour in them had remained the same but it was if it had been painted on parchment. She wondered if that would happen to her; if her eyes would get set with age and die while she was still alive. For now they remained deep and dark.

  She closed out the sound of her daughter sobbing beyond the door and began to apply the kohl. Appearance was going to be important. She had applied a home-made foundation cream recommended by the gipsy, and it had hidden the dark rings under her eyes. The kohl, applied to the lower eyelids, would accentuate her eyes. The first impressions would be the important ones. She raised the makeshift pencil carefully to begin the application when there was a sudden hammering on her door which startled her so that a black line ran from her eye down to her cheek.

  – I want to come too, Mummy. Why can’t I come too? It’s not fair!

  Catherine threw down the pencil.

  – I’ve told you. We’ve been through all this. You can’t come with me. You’ll see Daddy soon enough.

  – But why can’t I meet him with you at the station? I wanted to come for a ride in the car.

  – Mummy and Daddy need to talk. You’ll see Daddy soon enough.

  – It’s not fair! It’s not fair!

  She turned back to the mirror and, with a handkerchief, began repairing the damage.

  “The war brought this to a head.”

  That thought passed through her mind again. Something had not been right for a long time but she had not been able to pin it down. A collection of small, disparate things had been gathering, like dust over time, in the corners of her mind. She saw, too, that the occasional moments of insight that came to her, like sudden sunlight, revealed that the air was thick with dust, glinting and gleaming around everything. Illumination. Revelation and illumination had been slow. But she trusted her instincts and had been patient. And now it was as though she was able to look into her own thoughts as one who looks into a room that was once clean and has now become dirty.

  She inhaled deeply. It had not been her fault. It could not have been her fault. The war had quickened an existing process, had allowed her to become aware of its progression: two years? Three? Four possibly? At some point he had detached himself, or become detached, from his orbit around her. But they had remained happy. Life itself had not changed. Evening conversations and the daily intimacies of their lives together had lost little or nothing of their tempo. There was just the odd “wrong” note; the occasional missed beat. The moments when she had asked what he was thinking and he had said “nothing” when he had been too deep in thought to be thinking of nothing – or to be thinking of nothing important.

  And then war was declared and something changed. When had it changed? She had done her best to articulate for herself something that still remained beyond her words. Evacuation! It came to her suddenly like a shaft of sunlight: it was at about the time, or soon after the newspapers started to be full of ministerial advice that the children should be evacuated. But the change – the acceleration – couldn’t be connected to their daughter, could it? She was as sure as she could be that it was not. It was as though whatever new orbit he had been on had been lost gradually. As if he had begun to drift inexorably through the empty spaces in their lives.

  She thought of him over the last six months or so: detached … uncoupled … disengaged …

  They were undergraduates at a time before wireless. She had a gramophone and they amassed a collection of 78s which they would dance to or simply have on in the background – quietly, to avoid the College curfew and the porters. She would always have to go down to his College in the heart of the University. He didn’t like the exercise that a trip to Girton entailed. He could listen to the same 78 again and again – she tired of their records more quickly than he did. He didn’t like it when there was no music, as though, she thought at the time, he didn’t like to be alone with his thoughts. She supposed that she was more at ho
me with herself than he was with himself, but she didn’t mind that.

  And so, as the music palled for her, they would play chess. She had concluded that he was moderately intelligent and she liked that in him, though she saw, even then, the limitations to his intellect. They would play chess. And she would always win. You can learn a lot about a man if you play chess with him regularly. He was impulsive and would panic and act precipitately.

  He made silly mistakes. Beating him was easy. In all the permutations of a game of chess she would know how he would react when pressure was applied – when things went in unexpected ways. And she was always capable, in chess, of the unexpected. He was moderately intelligent. But intelligent enough, she thought, to become a success at the Bar. His comparative failure irked her, if only because she felt that she could have made a better fist of it. But it was still a Man’s World and she had settled into her expected place as a housewife and a mother. If she regretted anything it was that. And he would come home and tell her of his cases and the advices he had written, and time and again she would ask him the perceptive question only for him to say that he hadn’t thought of that. And she had studied English!

  Deborah was still sobbing beyond the door. She was more like her father than her mother. She was emotional and impulsive and lacked self-discipline. She would do well. She could get to Cambridge. After the war, when the world changed, as it had to, she would find it easy to establish herself in a profession. She ought to do better than Adam – but not, she thought without arrogance or conceit, as well as she herself would have done given a better chance.

  She missed the fact that they no longer played chess together – even though she would always win. But in a sense she was embarking on a game of chess of sorts … It was not like the chequered board: there were no blacks and whites anymore and they could not take it in turn to move their pieces. But she knew, at least, how he was likely to react to her moves – sometimes as a rook would move, sometimes as a knight – sometimes as a pawn. A game of chess of sorts. But this was one game that she knew she could not win. The best that was left to her, if she chose her own battleground and attacked, was a draw that was an honourable draw of sorts. The very best she could hope for – she allowed herself a dry and bitter chuckle as the thought came to her – was a stale mate.