by Nina Bawden
Chapter Seven
I woke in the morning with a bad head and a mouth like a cheese grater. I hadn’t slept much; I remembered watching the sky grow light and wondering whether I should give it up and go and have another bath. I must have fallen asleep then, because it was quite late when I did wake up, and I could hear people talking outside.
I got out of bed and went to the window. It was a cold day, and the sun was seeping through the clouds in a way that made everything look more dreary than if there had been no sun at all.
There were several policemen in the drive. I couldn’t see the garage from my window, but they seemed to be doing something there. The car was in the middle of the drive; they had got the seats out of it and put them on the flagged terrace that bordered the house. I could, see Walker sitting on one of them. He was talking to a little man in a dirty mackintosh.
I couldn’t hear anything that they said through the shut window, and there didn’t seem to be much point in opening it because it made such a hell of a row and I would only call attention to myself, so I got dressed as quickly as I could and went downstairs to see if there was any breakfast.
It was later than I had thought, and there wasn’t much left, so I drank some rather cold coffee and ate a congealed rasher of bacon and went out into the drive.
There was no one about except the policemen: Walker had opened all the doors of the car and was examining the hinges through a magnifying glass. When he saw me, he stood up and gave me his polite smile.
“Good morning,” he said.
Seeing him now, in daylight, I recognised him without any doubt. I wondered if he remembered me.
I said, “Have you looked at that exhaust pipe yet?”
I wondered if I had infringed some sort of rule, because he didn’t say anything for a minute. He just looked at me gravely, as though he were considering something. But my question must have been in order because he said, then:
“Yes, there wasn’t anything wrong with it.” He spoke with a sort of abstracted air, as if it didn’t matter very much.
I wasn’t getting very far. I tried again.
“Have you decided what happened, then?” I asked.
“What?” He looked puzzled. “Oh. Not yet. We’ve found something, though.” He showed me something caught in the hinge of the back door. It was the metal tag of a shoe lace. It was high up in the hinge, above the level of the handle. It looked as if the lace had jerked right out of it. It was too high up for the lace to have caught when someone was stepping out of the car in the ordinary way. It looked as if it might have happened when the owner was lifted from the car. It was all very easy, but I didn’t like the way Walker watched me. He looked quizzical, and as though he was amused at something.
“It might have been there for a long time,” I said, trying to sound casual.
His face brightened. “Of course,” he said. “That’s always the trouble. Only there was a tag missing from Mrs. Sykes’shoe … the left one … and this tag matches the one on the right shoe.”
He looked very pleased with himself. I began to wonder why he was telling me all this. It didn’t make sense. Perhaps there was nothing behind it at all; perhaps he was just a self-important man, trying to impress. I said it was all very interesting, but that I mustn’t interrupt his work, and I turned away. He stopped me.
“Come and have a look at the garage,” he said.
He led the way, looking, from behind, like a little clerk in his work-day suit. The garage was a big one. I believe it had been a stable at one time, and, when it had been converted, the hay loft above had been made into a flat for a chauffeur. There was a flight of sturdy wooden steps in one corner of the garage, and Walker climbed them. I followed him, and then we were standing in a long, narrow room, lit by two windows on the south wall. There was a door at one end. The room was furnished; there was a carpet on the floor, and chairs, and a wide divan in the corner. The divan was covered with a very new looking rug.
“Quite a nice place,” said Walker, “isn’t it?”
“It was a flat,” I said. “For a chauffeur.”
He wrinkled his forehead and smiled politely.
“Really?” he said. “Mr. Sykes told me it has never been used. Except as a play-room. But that would be a long time ago. When he was a boy.”
I shrugged my shoulders. There wasn’t anything to say. Walker was standing in the middle of the room staring at the wall.
“What did you want to show me?” I said.
He looked at me in a baffled sort of way.
“Show you?” he said. “Oh, nothing. Nothing at all.”
He walked over to one of the windows and looked out of it. I looked round the room and saw something shining on the floor beside the divan. I walked over to it and bent down. It was the top of a lipstick case. I was going to pick it up when I thought of Walker. I looked at him. He still had his back to me and there was a kind of rigidity about him that made me wonder. I picked up the lipstick top and said:
“If your men have searched this place they missed something.”
“Oh?” He turned round. Perhaps I was expecting to see the disappointment in his face. I am sure I did not imagine the deflated way in which he took the lipstick top from me. He didn’t look at it, he just put it into his pocket. Then he looked at his watch.
“Back to work,” he said, with the same polite smile.
As we went down the steps, I said, “Have you seen Adlesburg again?”
He waited for me at the bottom.
“He was at the station this morning,” he said. “He wanted to make a statement.”
I said, “I see.”
Then Walker grinned in quite a friendly way, and said:
“Of course we have to take statements if people want to give them. Doesn’t mean we take them too seriously.”
I wondered whether it was an invitation.
I said, “I’ll be pushing along now. Will you want me again?”
“You’ll be about, won’t you?” he said.
I nodded, and left him. I went back into the house. There was a fire in the drawing-room and Sebastian was squatting in front of it, building a tower of bricks.
“Hallo, old man,” I said. “You better now?”
He didn’t look very well. He was white and sickly-looking, but he may have always looked like that.
“I’ve got to go back to bed after lunch,” he said importantly. “The doctor came to see me this morning.”
He didn’t say anything for a little while and then:
“I’m going to be a policeman when I grow up.”
“Are you?” I said.
He nodded violently. “Mr. Walker says I’ll make a good policeman,” he said, his eyes glowing.
“You’ve seen Mr. Walker, have you?” I said.
“Yes. He came to see me this morning after I’d had my bath. Mummy didn’t want him to, but he came anyway. He’s awfully nice. Do you know, he’s got a little boy who’s got a whole set of electric trains. He’s nine, too, like me.”
“What else did Mr. Walker say to you?” I asked.
He looked obstinate. “That was a secret,” he said. “He said I wouldn’t be able to be a policeman when I grew up if I couldn’t keep a secret. You know that, don’t you? Mummy says you used to be a policeman, too.”
“A sort of policeman,” I said.
“Did you wear a uniform?”
“No,” I said.
I wondered what Walker had got out of him. The police liked children as witnesses, I knew. They had less reason to lie than adults. I said:
“I expect he wanted to find out who was putting things in your food, didn’t he?”
“Something like that,” he said casually, and started to whistle under his breath. He went on building his tower with a look of self-importance on his face.
I tried another line. I said, “You’re not scared any longer, are you?”
There was a funny look on his face.
“No,”
he said slowly. “I don’t think so. Only at night. But Mr. Walker says perhaps I’ll have my bed put in Dorry’s room. I shan’t be frightened then.”
“Not in your mother’s room?”
He said violently, “No,” and suddenly he looked scared. “Not with Mummy.”
“Why?” I said. “You’re not frightened of Mummy, are you?”
His lower lip started to shake. He didn’t look at me.
“I’m not really frightened of anyone,” he said. “Only I’d rather be with Dorry, that’s all.”
He looked at me sideways, and as if he didn’t like me. He got up and said, very politely, “Excuse me, but I’ve got to go and see about something.”
He went out, leaving his bricks in a scatter on the hearth.
The telephone rang. I went into the study and answered it. It was Rella. She said, “Paul, is that you? Oh, thank God.” I heard her give a kind of sob. “Paul,” she said. “Can you come here? Now?”
“What’s the matter?” I said. I didn’t want to see Rella. I wasn’t quite sure why.
“I cannot say,” she said. “Not on the telephone. But please come. Please.” There was something in her voice that made me a bit uneasy, so I said I would go, and put the telephone down.
As I walked to the village, I wondered what she wanted. I supposed it was something to do with Adlesburg. I wondered what he had told the police.
When I reached the cottage Rella opened the door before I had time to ring the bell. She was wearing a slatternly kimono affair. She looked scared to death.
“Come in, Paul,” she whispered, as though she was afraid someone might hear.
When we were in the sitting-room, she said:
“Paul, I want you to do something for me.”
She spoke in a very tense, central-European voice.
“Go on,” I said.
She bit her lip. “It’s Tom,” she said. “He went to the police this morning, and when he came back it was terrible. I have never seen him look like it. He says they are going to arrest him because of Venetia, and that they will never believe he did not kill her because of what he did during the war.”
“Where is he now?” I asked.
She looked afraid. She said, “That is what I want you to do. He has gone out. I do not know where he has gone. He looked almost … mad. Paul … I want you to find him for me and make him sensible …”
I said, “I don’t really see what I can do.”
She said, “Oh,” and drew in her breath in a quivering sigh. Then she looked at me and said, “I hate you.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Then all her muscles relaxed, and she started to cry. She cried as if she hadn’t cried for years. She sat down on the sofa and spread her thin arms along the back of it and buried her face in the kimono sleeve and let herself go. I waited until she’d cried herself out. When she was quieter, she looked up at me.
“I know what you think of Tom,” she said, “but I do not think that what he did during the war was so very terrible.” She looked at me for a moment, and then she said, “Can I tell you about it, please?”
I nodded. I had let myself in for it, so I sat down on the sofa and lit a cigarette and let her talk. She talked for a long time in her pretty, hesitating voice. Why she was so anxious that I shouldn’t think badly of Adlesburg I don’t know.
Adlesburg had been a gynæcological surgeon at a famous New York hospital. Rella had met him when she had had to go into the hospital for an operation, and he had been very nice to her. She had been working in a drug store; when she was in hospital she lost her job and Adlesburg was sorry for her and offered to take care of her. He found her a little flat in Greenwich Village and he used to visit her there twice a week. He wasn’t mean, and Rella was better off than she had ever been. She didn’t have to work any more and she was able to spend a lot of time in the drug store where she used to work, drinking ice-cream sodas and swanking about her lover to the girls behind the counter. She met Marlene in the drug store. Marlene was fourteen; she came in one night with a soldier. She was very drunk, and when she went to the lavatory to be sick the soldier walked out. He didn’t come back, and Rella was sorry for her and took her back to the flat.
Marlene was on the streets. She had been on the streets for three months, and she wouldn’t be on them much longer because she was going to have a baby. She was very defiant about it and thought she’d been rather clever. She came from Washington; she’d had a boyfriend there and left home because her parents found out what they had been doing in the back of the Ford car his parents had given him for his eighteenth birthday. They had said she wasn’t to see him again, and Marlene had persuaded the boy to run away with her. He had promised he would meet her at the station, but he didn’t turn up, so Marlene had come to New York alone.
She was a pretty little thing in a vacant way, and Rella was sorry for her. She kept her at the flat for a while, fed her and bought her some clothes, and then the child disappeared. Rella looked for her half-heartedly, and then decided that she was a graceless little pig and forgot about her.
A month later she saw her on Fifth Avenue, standing on the edge of the side-walk and looking very much the worse for wear. Rella reached her just as she stepped out in front of a bus. The bus swerved and missed her, but she was knocked down by a bicycle and fainted. Rella got to her first, and called her by name, and the crowd that gathered seemed to think that she was Rella’s responsibility and ought to be taken to hospital. There was no doubt in Rella’s mind that the girl had tried to kill herself.
She took Marlene to the hospital where Adlesburg worked. She was able to see him, and she told him the whole story. He kept Marlene in the hospital for a little while and then he operated on her and took the baby away. He sent her back to her parents, and, a month later, found himself on trial for having performed an illegal operation. He got off, but he lost his job at the hospital and he couldn’t get another. He tried to dismiss Rella with a handsome present, but she wouldn’t leave him. She went back to work in another drug store and Adlesburg came to live with her at the flat. Things were up and down with them; Adlesburg started a cheap practice in a slummy district and grew moody and silent. Then, just before the war, he disappeared without telling Rella where he was going or that he was going at all. She came home one evening and found him gone.
She didn’t know where to look for him, and in the end she became friendly with the son of a prosperous barber and, when the United States came into the war, she married him before he was sent abroad.
She never saw him again. He went to the Far East, and when the war was over he was still there. Rella had read about Adlesburg in the newspapers, and when the war was over, and the travel ban lifted, she got out of New York and came to England. Somehow she got in touch with Adlesburg, and when he came to London she was waiting for him. And she had been with him ever since.
She must have loved him, I thought. It didn’t make her any less of a bitch, but I liked her for it.
When she had finished I didn’t say anything. What she had told me explained Adlesburg, but then there always was a sob story behind men of his kind. It didn’t make it any easier to accept what he had done. Henry would have said, I think, that it would have been different if he had been a soldier. I had never been able to find a logical reason for that point of view, though I could understand it.
“Do you know what he told the police this morning?” I asked.
“He told them about Venetia and himself,” she said. “That night … he was going to meet her. They had somewhere where they always met. And as he was already in the house that night it would have been easy. But he didn’t meet her.”
“Used they to meet in the room above the garage?” I said.
She said “Yes” and looked surprised. “He told them that the car had already gone from the garage when he got there, but I don’t think that they believed him.”
“Did you know about Venetia from the beginning?” I said.<
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“Of course,” she said, almost scornfully. “How could I not know. It was not a new thing. Tom is very attractive to women. I think because he does not mind about them very much.” I thought that she spoke with a bit of an effort, although her voice was proud. “But it had never been like this before. I think that at the end he hated her. He wanted this new job, you see. We were going to be married, and he was afraid she would find some way to stop it all. I hated her too, very much.”
Her mouth tightened, as though something was hurting her. She said, “She was a terrible woman. She was so very beautiful that at first I didn’t see how terrible she was. She would never have let Tom go. I think perhaps she did love him.” She looked at me and smiled rather strangely. “She wouldn’t let you go, either, would she?”
I didn’t say anything. She went on, “You were married, weren’t you? Venetia told me that. She told me that you had left your wife and she looked pleased when she told me.”
I felt suddenly angry. I didn’t want to talk to Rella about Betty. I said, “There’s no need to talk about that.”
She sighed and said, “As you like,” and then she smiled at me in the same way that she had smiled on the night that Venetia had died, and I had opened Rella’s bedroom door by mistake. She spoke my name, softly, and I thought how strange it was that she had never lost the foreigner’s way of speaking English. Perhaps it had paid her to keep it. It was attractive, a faint huskiness that seemed to come from the back of the throat. I liked, too, the boyish angularity of her body. Quite suddenly, I didn’t want to go.
She was still smiling. The kimono had slipped from her throat and the whiteness of her neck gleamed in the dark little room. I began to wonder whether her concern over Adlesburg might not be a put-up job after all. I don’t think I really believed it was, but for the moment I wanted to.
Chapter Eight
When I left, at about two o’clock, Tom Adlesburg had not come back. I wondered if he had tried to run for it; he might have done if the police had told him he had been seen outside the house that night. Funnily enough, I felt almost sorry for him.
