Beat Not the Bones

by Charlotte Jay

  For the first time he looked fully at her and smiled. ‘Don’t you know that most of the world’s biggest crimes are committed by men who sit behind desks, keep their hands clean and sleep at night without dreaming? And usually when things blow up in their faces, as they sometimes do, they manage to worm out by a back alley, or, as Trevor has done, walk boldly through the front door.’ He paused and there was an ironic twist to his lips. ‘Yesterday he made out a detailed report of the whole thing. There’s something magnificent in that; you can’t help admiring it. I’m afraid you haven’t got a shred of evidence against him. He’s completely in the clear. The gold’s been dug up. Possibly his cut has already been disposed of.’

  He paused, and when he spoke again there was a note of anxiety in his voice. ‘You could of course invent a confession from Washington, but it would hardly cut much ice. You’ve suppressed it so far, and it would be argued that you had thought it up to clear your husband. You’re known as something of a fanatic in that line,’ he added, looking away. ‘But it would make things exceedingly uncomfortable for Trevor – and for others.’

  ‘Janet.’

  ‘Janet, for one.’

  ‘But, good God, she can’t love him! He treats her like a dog, a fool. She doesn’t even know what he’s like.’ She stopped abruptly.

  But he let the opportunity for cheap triumph pass by. ‘She’s used to him,’ he said quietly. ‘She’d be completely lost without him. She wouldn’t know what to do. She’s happy enough, in a way. She gets a lot of pleasure out of doing what she thinks he wants. Without him she’d be terrified. She hasn’t made a decision of her own in years.’

  Stella waited, hoping that he might say more, but he was silent. At last an overpowering curiosity pressed her to say, ‘What was she like when she was younger?’

  He did not answer, but turned and looked at her. She understood. ‘And that night when I came to dinner you changed your mind. You decided you’d stop it from happening again, you’d let me find out, about David and Trevor, no matter how horrible it was.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘It was more that I couldn’t bear to see someone else being taken in by Trevor.’

  She felt a sharp stab of disappointment. ‘I don’t understand you. One moment you seem to loathe him – I felt it even then – then in the next you protect him.’

  ‘That’s what makes it so impossible. You see, in his way he’s been good to me. When we were at school there was a little boy whose father owned a sweet shop. Trevor used to make him steal chocolates. And he always gave half of the spoil to me. I don’t know what he did, but that little boy was frightened of him. When I found out I stopped taking the chocolates, but I could never tell on Trevor. That was the beginning; it’s always been like that. He’s hung on to my job for me, he’s housed me and fed me.’

  ‘But don’t you see that’s his line,’ said Stella tensely. ‘That’s how he works. That’s what he did to David, helped him to an enormous extent. He gave him money and then suddenly turned round and forced him into this. He strangles with obligations. Look at the position he’s got you in. You can’t hurt him because you ought to feel gratitude, because you’ve eaten his chocolate and because you have a dead village of your own. He’s ruined your life. He certainly doesn’t like you.’

  ‘I don’t know what he feels,’ said Anthony slowly. ‘I didn’t know that I hated him until you told me. I disapproved of him, but … he feels we should stick together.’

  ‘You can’t. It’s killing you.’

  A car was coming up the hill past the house. For a moment its headlights flashed through the trees and glanced off Anthony’s face. He looked pale and tired, and gazed at her with fear and longing.

  Impulsively she put out both her hands. She saw in the flash the horror of his situation. Her heart went out to him, and in that moment she gave herself completely over to seeing him through it.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘We can’t do anything. It would be quite useless. It would do no good. It would be trouble-making and no more. He’ll just have to get away with it.’

  His face twisted into a spasm of anxiety. ‘Do you think so? Are you sure? I’m not.’

  ‘Well, I am. I’m quite sure,’ she said definitely. ‘Don’t look like that.’

  She wrenched her hand away and pressed her palm on his brow. ‘It’s terrible that he should get away with it, scot free, no scars, no fears, no bad dreams. But we can’t do anything about it. So let’s just admit it’s terrible and forget it. Don’t brood on it. Forget it.’

  They did not speak again for some time. Stella was watching the long black beans of the flame trees still hanging in the young foliage of the new season. I shall leave too, she thought and go back to the mess. She remembered the little room with the faded bed cover and the lizard in the corner of the ceiling. The memory took her back to her first days in Marapai, and a moment later she said, ‘I wonder what happened to Jobe.’

  He was at that very moment talking to Trevor Nyall, who had not gone to a meeting but was driving slowly along the sea-front.

  ‘What else could I do?’ Nyall was saying sharply. ‘Do you think I liked it? Do you imagine it pleased me to see it go?’

  Jobe sucked on the damp butt of a cigarette. ‘Seems to me it was a mistake to ever let this fellow Washington in on it,’ he said. ‘Can’t think why you did that. Nervous type. You should know about people. You should have picked him.’

  ‘We had to have him,’ Nyall said. ‘I never dreamed Washington would fall down on it – he’s too greedy.’

  ‘I’m glad she got back,’ Jobe said mildly. ‘Nice little thing, pretty as paint.’

  ‘You’re glad!’ Trevor threw him a brief glance, making no attempt to disguise both surprise and revulsion. The smell of Jobe’s body filled the car. The need to be even moderately polite to such a creature was irksome to Trevor. ‘Then don’t complain about losing the gold. It’s unfortunate, but it was the only thing to do. We’re lucky to be out of it. We’re clear; let’s thank our stars for that.’

  Jobe sucked on the damp brown butt of his cigarette, then dropped it on the floor of the car and crushed it out with his toe. ‘I haven’t lost it, Mr Nyall, you have.’

  ‘Well, it amounts to the same thing. If you can think of some way of getting it back from the administration, you’re welcome to it. When I promised you Warwick’s share …’

  ‘You didn’t exactly promise it, Mr Nyall. Mr Warwick gave it to me. Handed over his claim as it were.’

  Nyall gritted his teeth. He was not given to uncontrollable anger, but he burned with rage whenever he thought of what Warwick had done – those stupid, blundering, sentimental, repentant acts. The weak, hysterical, troublesome fool who was too squeamish to live with his own deeds – a letter to a sick man that had driven them all to this drastic end, a confession to this crooked rogue beside him. And then the weakest act of all, the taking of his own life.

  Jobe was still speaking. ‘Now if I should want to get the gold from the administration all I would have to do would be to take along Mr Warwick’s letter. That would show them plain enough how it all happened. How the gold was mine and you and Mr Warwick and Mr Washington had hopped in and grabbed it for yourselves. I think the administration would probably see that I’d been hardly done by.’

  If Nyall was disturbed by this speech he gave no sign. ‘They’ll probably give it back to the Papuans or put it into Native Revenue. You can bet your life you wouldn’t see any of it.’

  Jobe did not appear to be upset by the idea of the natives winning in the end. ‘Well, it would be worth trying, wouldn’t it?’ he said mildly.

  ‘Warwick was mad when he wrote that letter’ said Nyall harshly.

  ‘He was a little upset. But I can’t help feeling he knew what he was doing. I can’t help feeling he knew I’d insist on my rights.’ He turned round and gave Nyall a slow smile. His eyes sparkled in their dark sockets. ‘I think maybe he didn’t like the mess you’d got him int
o. I don’t think he liked you at all. He says in his letter he would never have agreed if he hadn’t been so pressed for dough. It was you that was doing the pressing, wasn’t it? I can’t help feeling he thought it wouldn’t hurt much if things was made uncomfortable for you.’

  There was no longer any denying the direction he was pointing the conversation. Nyall faced it without further evasion. ‘Blackmail,’ he said calmly. His eyes did not leave the road ahead. It was empty. They were out of the town and the houses were few and scattered.

  ‘I only want my rights,’ said Jobe plaintively. ‘I’m only asking for my share.’

  ‘It would take me years to pay you,’ said Nyall. His voice was quiet and controlled. His face gave no indication of his feelings.

  ‘I don’t mind waiting. You can pay it in instalments.’

  ‘How do I know you’ll be satisfied when it’s paid off?’

  Jobe was still smiling. ‘You’ll have to take a chance on that, Mr Nyall. On my word. After all I haven’t been unreasonable, have I? Another man might have expected the lot. I wouldn’t want to be a burden to you, Mr Nyall. But there is a lot you could do without. This car for instance. Bit flashy for this place, don’t you reckon? Jeeps are better for the islands. Sydney, that’s where this little baby should be.’ And he patted the door of the car. ‘And when it’s paid up I give you my word I’ll send back the original of Warwick’s letter. In the meantime’ – the road was cut into the cliff and he looked pensively over a steep drop to the sea – ‘it’s in the hands of a friend of mine who has instructions to send it to the administrator in the event of my death.’

  Nyall did not speak. He drew the car to a standstill, backed it into the cliff and turned round. He felt he could not bear the stench of the man’s body for a moment longer. They say natives stink, he thought. You could at least keep away from natives. The smell seemed to have soaked into his own clothes, and the pores of his skin. He had vague notions of hurrying home and cleansing himself under a shower. Realisation of the larger evil, the more devastating and lasting contact with this man, he still held at arm’s length.

  ‘You probably won’t place much faith in my word, Mr Nyall,’ Jobe was saying cheerfully. He was lighting another cigarette. The big, inappropriate car gathered speed. The road ahead stretched straight into the town.

  ‘You don’t like me, Mr Nyall. I know that. I can feel these things. Sort of instinctive, you know. You think I’m not a gentleman and you think I won’t keep my word. Well, I’m telling you, Mr Nyall, you can trust me. You’ll see.’

  His eyes glittered in the headlights of an approaching car. With laughter? With greed? Or merely with high spirits?

  ‘You’ll see,’ he said again.

  THE END

  AFTERWORD

  Charlotte Jay was born Geraldine Mary Jay in 1919 in Adelaide, where she works under her married name, Geraldine Halls, as a writer and oriental art dealer. She grew up in Adelaide, attending Girton School (now Pembroke School) and the University of Adelaide. She worked as a secretary in Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne and London during the 1940s and as a court stenographer for the (Australian) Court of Papua New Guinea during 1949. During the 1950s she and her husband, John, who worked for unesco, travelled and lived in Pakistan, Thailand, Lebanon, India and France. They operated an oriental art business in Somerset between 1958 and 1971, and since then, in Adelaide. (John died in 1982.)

  Charlotte Jay is the name she used to publish most of her nine mystery novels. Except for The Voice of the Crab (1974), they were first published between 1951 and 1964, and reflect a life spent travelling and her fascination with local cultures and ethnological questions – as do her six ‘straight’ novels published as Geraldine Halls between 1956 and 1982. Only her first novel, The Knife is Feminine, is set in Australia – in others, the action takes place in Pakistan, Japan, Thailand, England, Lebanon, India, Papua New Guinea, and the Trobrian Islands.

  Most of her Charlotte Jay mysteries were first published by Collins in London and Harper in New York. They have appeared in various editions and been translated around the world – The Fugitive Eye was made into a Hollywood movie starring Charlton Heston – but have not until now been published in Australia. She confesses she became rather confused about her national identity during her heyday as a mystery writer – the American reviewers always referred to her as British, the British reviewers called her an Australian, and the Australian reviewers more or less ignored her.

  She has described her motives and methods as a mystery writer like this: ‘I began writing mystery stories largely because of my delight in the novels of Wilkie Collins and Le Fanu and the stories of Poe. I read these books with terror and fascination when I was quite young and their influence can be seen in several of my early novels. When my first books were published most of the crime stories at that time were written by skilled writers of crime and detection, usually with a well-born ex-Oxford or Cambridge amateur as the private detective as the central character, appearing in the manner of the Scarlet Pimpernel, something of a fool, but omniscient and strides ahead of the reader. In America the same fashion prevailed along with crime stories following in the tradition of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. I knew I could not compete with the excellent exponents of these varied trends. Many had had direct experience of police procedure which I did not feel competent of learning anything much about. And indeed I felt no interest in doing so. I set out to frighten and mystify my readers by asking them to identify themselves with a character battling for survival in a lonely, claustrophobic situation. My publishers on several occasions demanded that, in the interests of logicality, my threatened character should call the police. I always contested their suggestions and sometimes rewrote whole chapters to accommodate my conviction that my characters must stumble on alone and unaided through their private nightmares.’ (From Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, St James Press, 1985.)

  Charlotte Jay’s second novel, Beat Not the Bones, was published in 1952 by Collins in London and in 1953 by Harper in New York. It received the inaugural Edgar Allan Poe award from the Mystery Writers’ Association of America and at the time was considered to be an accomplished novelty in mystery/suspense writing.

  It was Charlotte Jay’s first book to be published in the United States. Contemporary American critics wrote with enthusiasm about this new talent but with seeming surprise and a touch of condescension. Charlotte Armstrong, an important crime writer herself, said the book, ‘works you up to the revelation of a horrible secret, and the secret turns out to be the horrible surprise you hoped it would’.

  The doyen of crime writing critics, Dorothy B. Hughes, praised the book, observing that fewer than one in a thousand books live up to the promise of their threats. She rather patronisingly described Charlotte Jay as ‘an Australian girl who worked in the most primitive parts of the island of Papua New Guinea’. In actuality Charlotte Jay was thirty-one, had never ventured to the jungle interior and only made a few brief journeys down the coast, out of Port Moresby, when she accompanied the Chief Justice of Papua New Guinea on his circuit. Hughes, again rather obviously and blandly, claimed that ‘from her experiences and with a writer’s inspiration she composed the story.’ It would have been more useful, and more to the point, to have drawn attention to the extraordinary imaginative power that enabled Jay to evoke a palpable jungle with its brooding menace, and to her disconcerting and unique use of contemporary issues of colonial politics within the confines of a powerful mystery story. The critics concentrated on the story only. Understandably. They were critics of crime fiction, after all. But this limited perspective led them to miss other notable aspects of the book.

  Of course, mystery novels forty years ago did not deal in larger themes, the genre being notable for conventionally safe and undemanding narratives. Further, the setting for Beat Not the Bones was a little known and strategically insignificant South Western Pacific island whose colonial master, Australia, had only recently found a place
in the American conciousness. (Specific examples of the marginalisation of Australia by American media can still be found. In both the 1961 and the 1990 movie versions of Cape Fear the villain, Max Cady, had been imprisoned for rape offences committed in American cities. In John D. Macdonald’s classic thriller, originally titled The Executions (1957), Cady had raped a minor in Melbourne.) Serious reviews of Beat Not the Bones concentrated on the obvious and sold it short. They highlighted two aspects: the predictable genre element of ‘authentic horror and atmosphere’ (L.G. Offord) and ‘hair-raising mystery’ (James Sendoe); and the correctly discerned new element in the genre, ‘the interaction of an “advanced” and primitive race’ (Anthony Boucher), and ‘her probing ethnological study of the conflict of stone age and the twentieth century’ (Dorothy B. Hughes). But it is much more.

  Beat Not the Bones has the distinction of being a major novel of mystery and adventure; a unique historical narrative; and an early, untypical example of anti-colonial literature.

  Charlotte Jay has dismissed the latter two claims in conversation with the series editors, asserting modestly that the book is ‘only an adventure story’. But its positioning in that minor literary niche evades stronger claims which demand attention. The book is in the same lineage as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Like that strange and enigmatic story of despair and corruption, Beat Not the Bones has at its core the white man’s attempts to ‘colonize the savage’. Running like a thin, pulsing vein through the book is the regular beat of the author’s criticism of white administration. This is presented with some deftness, arising naturally within the requirements of the story. Jay never adopts that peculiarly modern tone of the ideological bleat but chooses to make her statements through the characters in her story. They are, therefore, understated. An example is when Tony Nyall and Washington have an argument about the qualities and nature of ‘the natives’. Nyall makes the observation, ‘We’re here to guide and guard, not to understand’. In its disinterested, matter-of-fact confidence and patronising superiority we hear echoes of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century colonial administration, creators of much racist stereotyping.