‘It was – a terrible winter,’ she said.
‘Yes, it was a bad winter – even where I was.’
‘Don’t be angry with me, darling. Please, please. I couldn’t bear that. It would make me cry.’
‘What happened that winter?’ I asked.
‘In – in the February I could stand the cold no longer. I thought of all the beauty I had seen. I longed for it again. In the February I could stand it no longer. I – went to Japan.’
‘And,’ I said, ‘ and to Bangkok and Hong Kong?’
‘Yes … then I came back through India. Bombay, Madras, up to Nepal, then Baghdad, Beirut. And home.’
‘It would cost you a lot,’ I said.
‘Yes. It was more expensive than we planned.’
‘But for one only. Or did you take your brother?’
‘No.’
‘Or some other man?’
‘No, it was for one only! I swear to you!’
‘And then?’
‘Forgive me, darling Jack,’ she said, beginning to cry. ‘Each year it was the same. Every year when I came home I swore it would be the last time. But every year it was the same. I went across America to Honolulu – two years ago, that was – and then to Tahiti. Then there was Mexico and South America. Chile is so beautiful I longed to stay there.’
‘But you came back.’
‘I came back. I’d promised you.’
‘Because of the risk to your brother?’
She looked at me in sudden fear. ‘ Because I had promised you! Don’t be too angry with me, Jack. I’ll – I’ll make it up to you. In time it will all be as you planned.’
‘How much of my money have you got left?’
‘I don’t know. Really I don’t know, darling.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Oh, don’t. Don’t, Jack.’ I had grasped her wrist. ‘I – have other things to tell you yet.’
‘How much did you spend? How much is left?’
‘Your money corrupted me! It made me think differently, act differently! I have never been the same. I should never have promised: I was too young to understand. You put too big a burden –’ Her hand twisted in mine, trying to get free. ‘Last year I had £3,000. I thought –’
‘Three thousand pounds! Great God!’
‘Wait! I have more now, darling. I knew then that somehow I must repay you. Somehow I must do something to help. I thought you might be out this year – I wasn’t sure. Then something you had said to me once – when I asked you how I should explain having this money if ever I was asked – that came back to me. I had one last holiday. I had always wanted to see Egypt and South Africa … After it I bought this flat, furnished it, set myself up. It was the only way. I have already made money …’
My mind was groping in the dark bog that her words had created. Before I could speak she went on: ‘I can make money again, Jack. This is very profitable. You cannot live here but we can often meet. You can come here as we arrange. And you can travel on my money – as I travelled on yours. When I can get away, if I can get away, we can still go together. Please, please try to understand what you did to me leaving me with all this money. I was only a child …’
I released her hand and got up. Doors were opening and shutting in my brain like cell doors clanging in prison. I saw lights where there were no lights, blundered over a chair, began to dress.
She slipped out beside me, put on a kimono, stood near to me, still gently talking, soft labial sounds, distressed, fearful, explaining, excusing, persuading. This must have been a terrible moment for her; yet she had faced it out of fear for her brother. She was very beautiful. I could see what a success she would be in her trade.
I thought of all I had done, of all I had suffered, of all I had planned, of the supreme success of the whole plan – utterly, uterly in vain because of her. I went insane with grief and rage. She had put on the bedside light and saw my face, and then she tried to turn and run.
I caught her at the door. Still pleading, still beautiful, she fought off my hands until they gripped her throat. Then she kicked and scratched while her heart still beat.
After a long while I was lying on the bed alone, and the insanity had passed, and she was on the floor. I got up slowly and went into the bathroom and sluiced my face and hands. Then I went back and looked at her and tried not to retch. My knees were like water, my hands trembling without control. I finished dressing and began to search her flat. The telephone went once but I ignored it. I found two hundred and twenty pounds in a wallet in a drawer. That was all I ever made out of my years in prison.
I put on my coat and went and had a last look at her. It was not until I was about to close the outer door of the flat that I thought of all the fingerprints.
So I went back in and dampened a tea-towel and spent half an hour wiping over all the surfaces I was likely to have touched.
‘I caught a train back to London but missed the last train for Newbury so spent the night in a cheap hotel.
… On the Monday morning I went back to my market gardening. And now I am waiting. There is no connection at all between me and the murdered prostitute – no one knows we ever met or knew of each other’s existence. The chances are that the police will find a fingerprint somewhere. If they do they’ll soon catch on. If not, I am free.
If I stay free I shall stick to market gardening and the soil. Growing green things out of the good earth is one of the few worthwhile jobs left. It is real to me, one of the few things left that are real. And in doing it one does not need to meet people or have dealings with them or to travel far.
If the police do catch up with me, it will mean, perhaps three years in close confinement, and then no doubt I shall be moved to a prison where I can till and hoe the soil again.
I don’t want to go back, but perhaps the end in either case is not very different.
These last few days, since that terrible visit to Brighton, some of the tension has been draining out of me. Five years in prison have quite unfitted me for the stress and strain of everyday life, the push and the pressure of people, the business of competing with other men, not merely for a living but for a foot on the pavement, a seat in a train, a place in a queue. Above all it has unfitted me for travel.
It is a relief now to know that all those grandiose schemes we thought up need never be implemented. It’s a relief that I shall never have to travel far again.
The Medici Ear-Ring
Bob Loveridge owned this Medici ear-ring. It had been in his family for a long time, and it was one of the things he’d always bring out to show you if you gave him any encouragement. He was proud of it, liked telling the story.
Bob was a friend of mine, though he was 20 years older, and for a few months I’d courted his daughter. Bob was in shipping and lived in Hampstead and drove a Bentley. Lucille, his daughter, had the usual Mini. Bob’s marriage had folded up about 12 years ago, and Lucille was now the only woman in his life.
I am an artist. That means I eke out life in patched jeans and a turtle-neck sweater and earn as much in a year, if I’m lucky, as a junior typist. This made the prospect of suggesting marriage to Lucille rather difficult. I had known the family all my life, and I got on well with Bob; and no doubt he had enough for three, but one doesn’t want to be kept – nor, if painting really means something, does one want to drift into shipping as a means of keeping a family. Because coy little water-colours of a Saturday just won’t do.
It was hard, as I say, because she was a pretty girl and we got on well – really well; she had the colouring I like: autumn-tinted hair and short-sighted sleepy eyes with umber depths to them. So when she took up with Peter Stevenson I was half jealous, half relieved. An artist can afford girls, and there are always girls in Chelsea who will share your bed and your gas stove; but marriage … Peter’s arrival took temptation out of my way, but made what I was losing all the more delectable.
I liked him too – perhaps all the better because he also was poor. Bu
t as a Grammar School junior teacher even his prospects, at twenty-three, were better than mine at thirty.
This time I’m talking about, they had been engaged three months, and Bob Loveridge rang me inviting me to his house for the evening.
Just then I’d rented a studio from an equally unsuccessful friend who was trying his luck for a change in Paris, and I was painting hard, having had luck with two things I’d sold to the Grantham Gallery and was feeling generally inspired. I dragged myself away from the easel reluctantly and put on my best suit and went along to the Loveridges expecting a good meal and probably an evening of bridge with him and Lucille and Peter Stevenson. Bob was mad on bridge, and I like it for its orderliness, its formality. But when I got there I was told there was to be an eight. The Mayhews and the Frenches were coming, and we were to play duplicate, which is always a bit more intense.
The Mayhews turned out to be an upper middle-aged, upper middle-income couple from out of town somewhere; she a Jewess, and he a tight-necked, red-faced man with a Battle of Britain scar on his cheek. The Frenches were late and when they came it was only Captain French, his sister having gone down with a migraine.
I disliked French at sight. Perhaps he couldn’t be blamed for his defaulting sister mucking up the evening; but he was in a crack regiment, not long out of Sandhurst, and young and suave and far too sure of his own charm. He hardly bothered to apologize for being late or for not letting Bob Loveridge know in time to get an eighth. The fact that he had come himself was apparently in his view a more than adequate recompense.
And straight away he set his sights on Lucille and took a bearing. He talked so much to her at dinner that she might have been the general’s daughter. Now Lucille is nobody’s fool, and no doubt it had happened to her before; but I suppose his charm really did work for some people, and she was modest enough to be flattered. I could see rocks ahead. Peter Stevenson stood the onslaught on his girl pretty well. He was on his best behaviour, of course, but I had known times when he could be quick off the mark and bull-headed. Humphrey French – and in a way Lucille – were trying him high tonight.
After dinner we drifted into the drawing-room, and the two tables were set for bridge; and all I could see – for three of us anyhow – was ‘ dummy’ bridge, which is neither fish, flesh nor fowl, and I was beginning to yawn mentally when Captain French suggested couldn’t we play poker instead? What business it was of his to suggest this I never knew, but anyway Bob Loveridge said, why not? if everyone was agreeable, we could make the stakes fairly small.
This we did, pulling the two tables together and settling down, French again beside Lucille; and Peter took the opposite side of the table. By now his face was tightening, like somebody’s glove that’s a size small.
A humorist once called poker a game of chance. Maybe he was a good player. I am not. Nor is Peter. Or he wasn’t that night. But that night it became a sort of private war between him and French, and that made him reckless. French, of course, was cool as an ice-pack and knew his stuff – from long years of practice, no doubt. Anyway, he won all along the line. As for the others, the Mayhews lost a little, but in the good-humoured way of people having an inexpensive evening out. Bob Loveridge was just in pocket. Lucille was very lucky and won quite a lot. This made things more difficult for Peter. By eleven I was £18 down. Peter about £40.
At this stage, Peter said with deadly politeness that he was cleaned out, and the game, in spite of Humphrey French’s offer to lend him a fiver, broke up. Well, I was livid both with French and with Bob Loveridge, because Bob must have known if he’d the gumption of a louse that neither of us could afford to lose that kind of money. In spite of my little run of prosperity £18 to me was more than £100 to him, and I could see it might mean me being late with the rent for the studio, an idea I wasn’t wild about, seeing there was someone in Paris depending on it for his bread ticket.
And £40 to Peter at this stage must have been quite a fortune. A war orphan since he was three, he’d had a fairly tough life; and the thing that astonished me was that he had that sort of spare folding money spoiling the line of his jacket. (It came out later that an elderly aunt had just died and in the way of old ladies had kept a nest-egg in a tin box under the bed. This had been found by the district nurse and turned over to him that day. As he said to me afterwards, if the party had been a day later the money would all have been out of harm’s way helping to reduce his overdraft.)
By this time a bit of the general embarrassment must have penetrated Bob Loveridge’s thick skin, and there’s no doubt he would later have tried some tactful and roundabout way of making it up to the boy – if it had ever got that far. So would Lucille; but for her it was already a little late. By now Peter’s general dislike of the situation was centring not so much on Humphrey French as on her.
It wasn’t unnatural. Anyone who’s been in love knows that love is about as stable as the bubble in a spirit level. Give it the slightest tilt and you’re way off centre and inclining at 45 degrees towards the milder forms of homicide.
So the fraternization between Peter and Lucille after the poker game was strictly nil. Humphrey French was still making a fuss of the girl, but she’d seen the red lights, and did some back-pedalling.
Then I heard Mrs Mayhew ask about the Medici Ear-ring. Bob Loveridge had mentioned it to her at supper, and this started a new trend of talk. He went across to his little safe in the wall and brought back the ear-ring for us to see.
Of course I’d seen it three or four times before, and watched the usual reactions, the exclamations of interest and admiration. I estimate Bob must have had more than his full repayment in entertainment, even if he had bought the thing and paid double its value in some casual sale; but in fact he swore it had been in his family a hundred and fifty years.
‘My great-great-grandfather bought it in Naples from a broken-down nobleman. My great-grandfather in a letter to his brother refers to a parchment that went with the ear-ring, telling how it came to be made and giving a record of its owners, but, whatever it was, it’s been lost. All we have is this letter which presumably tells the same story, the way one would write to one’s brother about it. The date of the ear-ring is 1494.’
‘Very exact,’ said Mayhew, finishing his whisky. ‘Would it be spring or autumn?’
‘Well the exactness is not so silly as it sounds – that’s if the story is really true. In fact it would be the autumn.’ Bob really enjoyed being able to say this. ‘A pair of ear-rings were made by a Florentine silversmith for one of the Medicis, Pietro the Second. Lorenzo – the great Lorenzo – had been dead only two years and his son Pietro was 23, a brilliant young man but unstable and dissolute. These ear-rings were made to his order for his current favourite, a girl called Giovanna Farenza, and the story is that when they were ready, Pietro insisted he should fit them in her ears himself. But while he was in her room doing this – and who knows what else besides! – news came that the French under Charles VIII were in Italy and advancing on Pisa and Leghorn with 40,000 trained soldiers. Florence was committed by treaty to oppose this invasion, so Pietro up and left Giovanna Farenza on the instant, with one ear-ring in her ear and the other still in his pocket. They never met again. Pietro was outnumbered and turned yellow. He gave in to his enemies and made a shameful bargain with them. When he returned to Florence he was thrown out for his treachery, and the long Medici rule was at an end. Pietro after a few attempts to regain power went south with the French and a few years later was drowned in a river crossing and buried at Monte Cassino … This ear-ring … this is the other one – the one that is supposed to have belonged to Giovanna Farenza …’
It was a pretty trinket, heavy for the modern eye, of chased silver with a pearl inset. It was a pretty story too. Even if the thing had been dreamed up in some silversmith’s shop in Naples, it was still picturesque. One felt it ought to be true.
‘I should think this is worth quite a lot,’ said Humphrey French. ‘The pearl alone.’
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‘I’ve never had it valued,’ said Bob. ‘ To me it’s just an heirloom that I wouldn’t want to be without.’
Captain French said: ‘ What do you think, Nora? You ought to have a pretty good idea.’
It was the first hint I’d got that he and Mrs Mayhew had met before. Nora Mayhew coloured and picked up the ear-ring again.
‘Why you?’ said Bob Loveridge, asking the natural question.
‘I’ve studied antiques,’ said Mrs Mayhew. ‘ I used to have a shop in Marylebone Lane. This … Oh, I’d think it was worth …’ She felt the pearl between her fingers. ‘Dreadfully difficult to know nowadays, but if the pearl’s what it seems, I should say that is worth £300. The whole thing – as an antique – I think if you put it up at Sotheby’s you’d be very unlucky to get less than £500 – even without the story.’
Loveridge said: ‘Well, I should never sell it. It’s got a sentimental feeling for me – as if Giovanna Farenza were an ancestor of mine.’
‘Perhaps she was,’ said Mayhew, chuckling into his tight collar.
‘The other one has never been found, I suppose?’ said French. ‘Isn’t it worth making a duplicate? You’d look wonderful in them,’ he added to Lucille.
‘I’ve never had my ears pierced. Anyway, I’m not the Italian type. One needs to be dark and tall, with sleek heavy hair.’
Loveridge was called away to the telephone and talk broke out generally. When Bob came back he gave us whiskies all round and under this warming influence things improved.
About midnight the Mayhews said they ought to be going: it was a long ride back, and Mayhew was flying to Paris in the morning. They got up, and others got up, and then Loveridge said:
‘Oh, I’ll put the ear-ring away,’ and picked up the case and carried it to the safe. At the safe he stopped with his back to us, while Humphrey French told us about a marvellous yachting party he had been on last year. After a minute Loveridge turned and said: ‘By the way, what did I do with the ear-ring?’
The Japanese Girl & Other Stories Page 5