A month or so ago, one Thursday afternoon, I stopped a murder. But when I think what a chance it was, what a near thing, what trivial things it all depended on—well, I get shudders down my spine.
I’m a writer of sea stories, no great shakes, Robert Beringer by name. I’ve always done a bit that way—writing I mean—ever since I ran away from the top form at school to sea out of sheer dreaminess, and lately I’ve taken to it altogether. I have a room in London not too far from the Thames, and when I get stuck in a story, then I go down the hill, wind myself through all that muddle of trams on the Embankment, nip across Westminster Bridge, and limp up and down that stretch of promenade beside the river in front of St Thomas’s Hospital. It’s quiet there. No traffic; only the river, grey and streaky if it’s on the ebb, full and rippling if the tide’s going upstream. Across the river there are the Houses of Parliament in a long grey row—the little pointed turrets or minarets or whatever you call them look well against almost any sky. At the end there’s Big Ben, which I’ve always had a fancy for ever since hearing him once on the radio when coming in after a nasty time in convoy across the Atlantic. (It was the next convoy when we were torpedoed, I got my foot crushed, etcetera, and had to leave the sea for good.) Then there are the barges moored together in rows, and little tugs fussing up and down, curtseying their funnels to pass under the bridges, and sometimes police launches, very swift and spick. On the other side of the walk there’s the hospital wall and the hospital, which as you know had a bad time during the war, so the river face of it seems quiet. The walk itself is emptyish in the afternoons; on the seats are sometimes a few mothers with babies in prams, some lovers, an invalid or two taking the air in the shelter of the hospital, and walking along will come a father-mother-little-girl selection in good coats who’ve never been there before and are looking about and liking it, or an occasional man-with-dog. But they’re all spaced out, never more than two or three at a time. Not enough to disturb the great mind at work, wrestling with a recalcitrant character or twist of plot.
Well, this Thursday I speak of, I was in the middle of chapter fourteen, blockade-running in the Spanish Civil War, and going on fine. A whole lot of new stuff had come into my mind with a rush while I was shaving that morning, and I couldn’t get it down fast enough. At midday I took a sandwich at the desk and went on working.
I had got to the part where the hero, a Merchant Navy man like myself, was about to get engaged to the girl, when the mechanism stuck. I couldn’t make those two understand each other to save my life. I struggled a bit; smoked a cigarette, walked up and down, looked out of the window with my hands in my pockets, counted the plant pots on the balcony opposite, and was pleased to see that the dry little sticks in them were beginning to show green. Then I sat down, doodled heavily at the corner of a clean sheet of writing-paper, threw it away, stretched out my hand to the cigarette pack and found it empty.
That settles it, I thought. I put the lid on the typewriter and the paperweight on the typed sheets, turned out the cat and took my hat down from the peg. I debated whether to take my coat, looked at the spring sunshine and decided against it. I’d got down three or four stairs when the telephone bell rang and I had to come back. It proved to be a wrong-number call and didn’t detain me long. Just a few seconds.
In the street I found the bright sun was a bit deceptive. There was quite a cold wind blowing, dust rising, smoke careering across the sky. I cursed, for I knew I couldn’t risk it without a coat—the Atlantic in mid-winter had seen to that, even though it was all more than three years ago now. ‘You should have noticed all those weather signs from the window,’ I told myself as I ran back upstairs. ‘Call yourself a writer! Call yourself a sailor!’ This little vexation made me particularly noticing for the rest of the afternoon, if you know what I mean.
Well, I got my raincoat and ran down again and called in at the tobacconist’s round the corner for some fags, had a bit of a clack with him as usual, and set off for my river promenade. The two rows of trams seemed particularly tangling that afternoon; I can’t risk much at traffic-crossings, you see, with my tiresome foot. But at last I got across and set off up the Embankment. The tide was flowing and tugs drawing barges were belting up the river with that pleased self-important virtuous look tugs always have. Some seagulls were flying about, screeching, and I stopped to watch. I always wish Walt Disney would do a film about a seagull, and as I stood there I began to imagine how such a film would begin. That delayed me quite a bit, you see.
At last I got to my promenade on the south side of the river. I walked along at a thoughtful sort of pace, stopping at times to look at Big Ben’s gilt faces, the westerly one shining in the sun. The place was very empty, it being at a dead time of the afternoon now between three and four when grown-ups are at work, and the day a bit blowy for babies. However, as I went along I saw a youngish fellow, about the mid-thirties I should say, leaning up against one of those tall pillars with dolphins curling round them (very natural too from what I’ve seen of dolphins) holding glass globes for lights.
‘Come now, do your stuff,’ I said to myself, being still vexed over my mistake about the weather. ‘Be a writer if you can’t be a sailor.’
So I observed him, as they say, pretty closely. He was a nice-looking chap, fairish and fair-complexioned, clean-shaven, broad-shouldered, rather above middle height, wearing a blue demob suit. One of his hands, which rested on the parapet, was wound round with a clean bandage, figure-eight style, with some iodine-stained cotton-wool sticking out over the fingers, and a couple of neat turns round the wrist. (I had eighteen months of bandages with my foot, so I know all the bandage lingo.) He had nice firm-set ears, judging from the one I could see. I noticed the ear because that was the view he presented to me; he was flattened sideways between the dolphin pillar and the parapet, rather as though he wanted to hide.
At that I fell to wondering what in fact he was doing, for he couldn’t see much from where he stood, and as for sheltering from the wind, that he certainly was not, for the wind was blowing the way I was walking, upstream straight on to him. I got an odd impression he was listening for something, though what he could be listening to or for, in the middle of an empty stretch of embankment, with one man about fifty yards away on a seat and nobody else at all until a seat right at the far end where there seemed to be a woman in a bright blue coat with a child, I really could not see. However it wasn’t my affair—as I thought.
‘If you’d come round the other side of that dolphin,’ I mentally urged him, ‘it would be far more effective, believe me, than turning up your collar against the breeze as you are doing now.’
However that was his affair and I walked on, and presently came up level with the man on the seat.
Conscientiously I turned on him my writer’s eye. First I thought he was young, then I wasn’t sure he was as young as I’d thought. He was dark and small and slight, with pointed features, and had a nice smooth pink cheek, like a girl’s, but somehow he looked as though he’d seen a good deal of life. Sophisticated—in fact, almost raffish. He was well turned out; smart cigar-brown suit, shoes and hat to match, striped old-school-looking tie though I daresay it wasn’t, fawn shirt very clean, and a fine new off-white raincoat, I noticed this raincoat particularly, because my raincoat had been like that when it was new, before the buttonholes frayed and the straps for the belt came unhitched and the whole thing got dirty. I must say I gave his raincoat an envious, not to say, jaundiced, look, and wondered how it was some people contrived to be clad from head to toe in brand new clothes in spite of coupons, while others like me looked thoroughly shabby. He stared back at me rather insolently, I thought, but perhaps I’d fixed that raincoat rather too long and covetously.
When I’d got a few yards past him I quickened my pace, because now the girl in the blue coat who had been sitting down at the far end got up and began to walk away, holding the child by the hand; and I saw that she was Ger
da. I whistled after her, a special whistle which Frank (her husband) and I had always kept for each other; she heard and turned and came towards me, and we met halfway.
Gerda has always been the only girl in the world for me, ever since Frank introduced me to her seven years ago, at the end of our first voyage together. They were already engaged, and anyway Frank was the better man, so there was never any hope for me; but that didn’t prevent me feeling the way I did about her, and she knew it, though there was never a word spoken about it between us. Meeting her now always brought it all back—the torpedo I mean, and being in the water with Frank and seeing him get knocked on the head by a bit of wreckage, and towing him towards the corvette which was megaphoning at us impatiently (for the U-boat was still lurking about with plenty of torpedoes left) and helping him up the swaying rope-ladder and being so thankful when we reached the deck. It was all no good though; we buried him two days after, at sea. Gerda wasn’t the lively-looking girl now that she was when I first saw her, of course. There were the two children—this one running about with her now was the younger, Frank had never seen him, the other was at school. She had lost her husband, dearly loved (as they say on gravestones) if ever a man was. Her brown eyes had an anxious kind of look and her colour was a little faded and there was even a thread of grey or two in her dark hair. But to me she was Gerda; and to tell you the truth one of the reasons why this riverside walk was a favourite of mine was that I knew she sometimes came there of an afternoon with the little boy. Her uncle and aunt, who had brought her up, had a little house in the Elephant and Castle district, and she was living with them.
Well, so Gerda and I met and had a word or two. The kid, Frankie by name, is my godson and naturally I take a special interest in him. A fine little fellow he is too; very small when born owing to Gerda’s upset about Frank, but a fine bouncing three-year-old now. Fair hair like Frank’s, brown eyes like Gerda’s, rosy cheeks, chubby knees, a very sweet smile somehow when he looks at you, and as much energy as a dynamo. He ran to me now and jumped up and down all round me, and I pretended to lunge out at him with my fist, and he laughed and jumped away and came back asking for more, and Gerda looked at him proudly and smiled, and I smiled too and felt happy. Then Gerda asked after my foot and cough, and to put her off I asked after Dorothy—that’s her little girl. This was a mistake, because Gerda started and looked at her watch and said she must go, it was getting time for Dorothy to be coming home and she liked to be there to welcome the kid. She took Frankie’s hand and began to walk pretty quickly towards the way she’d come, and I walked along with her. I didn’t say much; I was turning over in my mind a question I’d turned over many and many a time before: namely, had I the right to ask Gerda to marry me or hadn’t I? A lame foot—though it’s true the doctors said it would be right again eventually and certainly it was improving—and this tendency to bronchitis or whatever it was owing to the icy Atlantic water, etcetera, and then no steady job, only this writing business though there again it was sometimes very profitable. I’ve had an adventurous roving life since I first went to sea and adventure stories seem to come natural to me. Still, it didn’t add up to much to offer a woman. I loved the kids as though they were my own, and if Gerda had to marry anyone else I guessed Frank would like it to be me. But I was always diffident where women were concerned. And then, with no steady job and my foot—however, I’ve said all that before. I wouldn’t bother you with it only I just want to explain how it was that when we reached the end of the promenade where it debouches on to the Lambeth Road by the little floating dock, we stood a minute. I had my hand on Frankie’s shoulder to delay him and Gerda a moment, trying to decide whether to speak of marriage or not, and Gerda was looking up at me, as I know now hoping I would. I couldn’t manage to get out the words, and so I gave a kind of sigh, and said: ‘Well, goodbye for the present, Gerda,’ or words to that effect, and we parted. I walked back down the prom towards Westminster, and she turned off south towards her aunt’s home.
I was a bit upset in my feelings, and didn’t notice much of anything at first, hobbling pretty briskly along with my hands in my pockets and my eyes so to speak turned inwards to my mind. I did seem to feel in a half-conscious way that the promenade was very empty. Oh yes, I thought, coming to myself a bit, neither of those men is in sight. Nobody is in sight at all. This is the seat by the bombed bit, where the raincoat man was sitting. Now where’s he gone, I thought. He’s been pretty nippy if he’s got right down to the far end by now. Must have gone over the wall into the hospital grounds, I thought—not meaning it, really, just being sarcastic to myself. And where’s that chap by the dolphin? Vanished too?
Just then—you’ll remember I was now facing the wind—something, a bit of white with a tail, came blowing along the ground towards me, bouncing the way things do before a gusty breeze, sometimes partly trailing, sometimes quite off the ground. It came dancing up to me in company with a lot of dust and an old tram-ticket, skipped across my left shoe, caught a gust and sailed right up into the air over the parapet towards the river, then dropped out of sight.
Ah, I thought. Um. Well. Now what was that, and why does it seem to strike a special note? But good God, I thought, stopping so suddenly I almost fell over my own feet, that was a bandage. That fellow by the dolphin—that was his bandage. But what… But where… But how…
The next few minutes passed like a dream. Without exactly thinking what I was doing, I did a good deal. I sprang to the parapet and looked down, and there sure enough was the dolphin fellow in the water, drowning fast. I could see just his shoulder and sleeve, and then one glimpse of his white face, unconscious, with blood on it, before his body sort of rolled over and submerged, in the sickening way drowning bodies do. For a moment it seemed Frank all over again and I couldn’t take it, but habit tells; I found myself sprinting back to the next dolphin post, where there was a lifebuoy in a little wooden cover, and pitching it down into the river and tearing off my coat and following the buoy.
Then it was easy, really. The flowing tide brought him right up into my arms, as you might say, and I got the buoy over him and partly tied him to it by the belt of my raincoat—though how I’d thought quickly enough to plan all that out and bring the belt down with me I just don’t know. The tide took us up-river and I helped it as much as I could, and soon enough we were washed up at the little landing-stage, and there we were hauled out by the crew of a police launch, who by one of life’s ironies had seen me dive into the river and thought I was an intending suicide and swished across to stop me disposing illegally of myself. They were pretty well puzzled by the set-up when they saw their suicide swimming a strong backstroke towards them, dragging a buoy and a chap with a wound in the back of his head. But as soon as we were near enough to see faces, one of them exclaimed:
‘My God! It’s Denholme!’
They popped us both into their launch and there were explanations all round.
It seemed this Denholme, the dolphin-bandage man, was a detective-inspector on the track of a black-market racket. One of the crowd had slammed a railway door on him the day before when he was getting rather too hot after them, which explained the bandage. He had tracked down the raincoat man to the embankment—it turned out afterwards that the heads of the racket used to meet there to make plans and hand over the cash. The raincoat man, seeing his danger and his chance, had tried to tip Denholme over the parapet and had succeeded in getting him off his feet; there was a bit of a struggle, the bandage got torn off, the raincoat man knocked out Denholme and gave him a final push. Risky proceeding in broad daylight? It certainly was, and yet nobody saw it. Nobody would have known a thing about it if I hadn’t chanced to be walking by during those vital few seconds when the bandage blew along. I described the raincoat man pretty accurately, and the police did some rapid telephoning about him.
He’d got away (through the hospital grounds, it was thought) for that time; but give the police one end of a tangled
thread and they’ll unwind the whole skein in the end. Denholme recovered, the racket was smashed; I’m getting a life-saving medal, a reward, a clinking good plot for a story and the solution to my problem in chapter fourteen—which proved to be a matter of timing, which I’d got wrong before. I’m getting Gerda too. She read about the affair in the paper and came rushing round to see if being in the Thames had done me any harm. Well, it had thrown me back a bit and I was in bed, and when Gerda saw my room and the way I lived, she told me straight out I was killing myself, I needed home care, and she was going to give it me.
‘You mean you’ll marry me?’ I said stupidly.
‘What do you think I mean, Bob?’ said Gerda, looking me straight in the eye with a smile.
So there it is. The wedding day is next Monday. But, heavens, when I think what a near thing it all was! The story getting stuck, the cigarettes running out, the telephone call, my coat, me being vexed about the weather and so noticing everything about the two men very particularly; the trams, the seagull, Denholme’s bandage and me knowing bandages because of my foot; my talking to Gerda and playing with Frankie, the wind blowing just that way—it was a chance in a million to have synchronised all those properly and brought the thing off. Very messily planned, too, by life or fate or whatever you like to call it. Why bother with so much detail? Every story-teller knows that a big broad way of planning events is simpler, more economical, and far more effective aesthetically speaking, in the long run. Why bring in seagulls and bandages? Poor management on fate’s part, I call it. Or if it was chance, then it’s stranger still.
Anyway, there it is. A mighty close schedule. Timing to the dot. When I think what a near thing it was, as I say, I get shudders down my spine.
Deep Waters Page 23
