by Nina Bawden
Brigid and Henry and Sebastian were in the drawing-room when I got back to the house. Brigid was knitting with some hideous, purple wool, and Henry was sitting on the hearth-rug, cutting out paper figures for Sebastian. He was doing it very neatly, and with great concentration. They made a very comfortable family group in front of the leaping fire, and I don’t think that they were particularly pleased to see me.
“I didn’t know you were going to be out for lunch, Paul,” said Brigid.
She sounded aggrieved; she had obviously taken over the household. It irritated me, although I knew that Venetia had always hated household chores and would have welcomed Brigid as an unpaid housekeeper.
I said, “Well, did it matter?”
She still looked angry, but there wasn’t much she could say. She shrugged her shoulders and bent her flushed face over her knitting. Henry looked a bit unhappy, and said:
“You didn’t miss much, old man. Only boiled cod.”
Brigid said sharply, “What do you expect?” She sounded as if she had been married to Henry for years.
“Sorry,” mumbled Henry, pink about the ears. “I didn’t mean anything.”
I said, “Do you know what’s happened to Tom Adlesburg?”
They both looked astonished; I could have sworn that neither of them had thought about him since the night that Venetia died. Or was murdered.
“Why, what’s happened to him?” asked Henry, sitting back on his heels, and looking more than usually foolish with festoons of paper round his neck.
“He went to the police this morning, and he didn’t go home again,” I said. “I saw Rella, and she told me.”
Brigid looked puzzled. “Perhaps he’s gone for a walk,” she said. Then her expression changed, and she said,
“Sebastian, isn’t it time you had a rest? You know what the doctor said. He’d be very angry if he knew you weren’t in bed.”
Sebastian groaned, very realistically, and said, “But Mummy, you didn’t think about it till now. I’m quite all right. I don’t mind if you want to talk about Uncle Tom.”
“Who told you to call Mr. Adlesburg Uncle Tom?” asked Henry. His face was crimson, even his ears were crimson. I wondered, then, what he had thought about Venetia’s affair with Tom. Funnily enough, I had never thought about that.
Sebastian’s eyes were clear and limpid as innocence.
He said, “He told me to. One day when I went into the loft place above the garage. You know, Uncle Henry, where you said you used to play when you were a little boy. You said it would be too dirty now, and that Mummy wouldn’t like me to play there till it had been cleaned out, but I went to look and it wasn’t dirty at all. And when I was there, Uncle Tom came in and asked me what I was doing there. I wanted to ask him what he was doing, because it wasn’t his house, but I didn’t. And then he started to be nice, and said I could call him Uncle if I wanted to. I didn’t want to, much, and I didn’t either, not to him.”
Henry had got up, and was standing with his back to the room, looking out of the window.
He said, “And did you go when Mr. Adlesburg told you to?”
Sebastian wriggled as though he wasn’t very happy. Then he said, “Not’xactly. I mean, I did go, but he came with me.”
“Yes?” said Henry. His voice sounded very clipped and military, and Sebastian looked up at his back in an alarmed sort of way.
He said, “We went down to the village and he bought me some sweets. And he said … he said …” His voice faltered and he looked as if he were going to cry.
“That’s all,” he said. “Really it is.”
“Don’t lie,” said Henry roughly. Sebastian burst into tears. “I’m not, I’m not,” he shouted, through piercing wails. “I’m not telling lies. Only you can’t say things when you’ve said you won’t. That isn’t telling lies.”
“Henry, he’s not well. I won’t have you talking to him like this,” said Brigid. She slid to the floor beside Sebastian and tried to put her arm round him, but he wriggled his shoulders so that she couldn’t.
“Never mind, darling,” she said. “Don’t worry about it any more. We’ll go up and have a nice rest, shall we?”
Henry was looking penitent. “I’m sorry, old chap,” he said, quite gently. “I shouldn’t have shouted at you. Of course you mustn’t say things when you’ve said you wouldn’t. Not under any circumstances.”
He sounded very solemn and there was a curious urgency in his voice that I didn’t understand. Sebastian seemed to know what he meant, however, because he blinked the tears away and looked up at Henry with eyes that were very bright and intelligent.
“Thank you, Uncle Henry,” he said in a very adult way. “I think I’ll go to bed now.”
He got up, and went out of the room, looking small and rather forlorn. Brigid would have gone with him, but he wouldn’t let her. He said firmly, “I’ll go up alone, Mummy, if you don’t mind.”
Brigid looked as if she longed to put her arms round him, but she didn’t, and she came back to her chair looking rather lost and unhappy. She sighed and picked up her knitting and put it down again. She looked up at Henry uncertainly.
Henry looked as if he were going to explode. His face was purple and he was blowing through his moustache. I couldn’t look at the anger and the hurt and the bitterness in his eyes.
He said, “So that was where they used to meet. I often wondered. They might have chosen a more tactful place.”
“I should have thought it was supremely tactful,” I said. I found I could enjoy the spectacle of Henry being an outraged husband. It didn’t suit him; in anger he appeared merely grotesque and rather funny. Venetia would have been amused, I thought, and then I remembered that I wouldn’t be able to share things like that with Venetia any more. That made me feel suddenly lonely, and made Henry seem not so funny after all.
He wasn’t looking at me; I didn’t think he had heard what I said, and I was glad.
He said, “I used to play there when I was a kid. There were a lot of us, you know. There wasn’t room for us all in the house; we were always falling over each other. I used to go up into the room above the garage whenever I wanted to be on my own. You know how you are when you’re sixteen or so, a bit moony and queer. I used to sit up there for hours … not thinking exactly … more daydreaming. It always seemed a sort of special place to me. I can’t quite explain … it’s not the sort of thing you talk about usually.”
There was a look of mild surprise on his face that he should find himself talking about it now.
“I spent a lot of time up there, reading poetry. Seems funny now. I even tried my hand at writing it once. I wasn’t any good, of course, though I rather fancied myself at the time. I never showed it to anyone; that kind of thing was rather frowned on at school. They said it wasn’t manly. Mind you, I don’t say they were wrong. You start reading poetry and trying to write a bit, and you start thinking about women. Not in the sort of way we talked about them at school, of course. You know the sort of thing … you had to think of a dirtier story than the next chap or they thought you were a sap. I didn’t like it much, though I knew a lot of dirty stories. But when I was on my own, I didn’t think about women like that at all. I used to make up poems about them … sort of medieval, romantic things. I suppose I cribbed a lot of it without meaning to, though at the time I thought it was my own stuff. I always wrote in the room above the garage; it wasn’t quiet enough anywhere else. It was a kind of private place and it didn’t seem silly to be writing poetry up there.
“Then, when I left school, I went into the army. I learnt a bit about women there. Some of it was pretty unpleasant. Then when I met Venetia, I thought she was different. More like the women I’d written poetry to. I hoped she’d understand what I felt about her. I used to think that when the war was over and we came back here, I’d show her my place and tell her about it. And then, when we did come back, I couldn’t. I didn’t go up there at all, even on my own. I couldn’t bear to, somehow.
Venetia wanted to put a servant there, at first. And I wouldn’t let her … couldn’t tell her why. And then … she and this Adlesburg fellow …”
His voice drifted into silence, and he stood staring at nothing, looking somehow helpless and without defences.
Brigid was staring at him. Her mouth was slightly open, and there were two tears trickling down her face. She seemed quite oblivious of them; I watched them, as you watch raindrops racing down a window pane, until they splashed in her lap.
She said, “Henry, I didn’t know Venetia …”
It seemed impossible that she couldn’t have known. But I was sure that she was speaking the truth. She was such a bad liar. And she wasn’t the sort of woman who did notice that sort of thing. It wasn’t, I think, that she was unobservant. It was simply that she had very little curiosity about people. Venetia and I had never been able to understand that. It had been one of our special games, when we travelled by train, to work out the back-ground and history of the people in our carriage. We weren’t allowed to invent without evidence, although the evidence could be very flimsy. And it was permitted to get the people into conversation, and for that reason Venetia had usually won. She was an unusual and beautiful child, and the most unlikely people unbent, and talked to her. She was especially successful if she talked about her leg, and she never minded talking about it when we were playing the game. She was always able, too, to hold an expression of breathless interest throughout the longest and dreariest of conversations, long after I had retired to the lavatory to laugh.
Brigid had played the game with us once, and she had been hopeless at it. She hadn’t known what to look for; she knew, after we had told her, to look for a wedding ring on a woman’s hand, but if there wasn’t one it never occurred to her to see if there was a mark where a ring had been. And she would never ask questions; anyway I don’t think she could have done so without offence, she was much too clumsy. The last time she played the game with us she had ended by bursting into tears and saying she thought we were beastly little Paul Prys, who only wanted to make fun of other people.… Remembering this, I thought it very likely that Brigid had had no suspicions about Venetia and her lover.
Henry was looking at her tenderly. He said, “Yes, Biddy. I’d known for a long time. I only didn’t know where they met. I knew it couldn’t have been at my house … or his.”
Brigid looked desperately embarrassed. “But, Henry,” she said, “what did you think about it? Didn’t you mind?”
He said unhappily, “I didn’t think I had any right to mind,” he said.
“But you knew who Adlesburg was,” I said. “Didn’t that make it worse?”
He shook his head. “I’m not very clever about that sort of thing,” he said. “I was a soldier … never been taught to be anything else. And he was fighting for his own country, like me. I didn’t really see that it mattered how he was fighting. Left that sort of thing to the political chaps. He seemed a decent enough little man, to me. Matter of fact, I even felt a bit sorry for him at first…”
It was not the sort of opinion I should have expected to hear from Henry. It only shows that you can always learn something from everyone. I should have thought that Henry, as soon as he knew the kind of man that Adlesburg had been, would have kicked him out of the house. I wondered if I hadn’t got the whole thing a bit out of perspective.
“Who was he, Henry?” said Brigid. “What is Paul being so mysterious about?”
“He broadcast during the war,” said Henry. “From the other side, of course. It was mostly aimed at the troops in Europe … the usual sort of muck. How the Master Race were winning and our chaps were being led by the nose by a lot of nasty old men who didn’t know one end of a gun from another and didn’t care, anyway, because they were all tucked away in cosy little billets underground. It got us down a bit … the men laughed at it, mostly.”
I felt a bit deflated. I said, “Our people thought he was quite important. As important as William Joyce.”
Brigid wrinkled up her eyes. “I never understood about him,” she said. “He always seemed so silly, to me.”
Henry said, “It doesn’t matter, anyway. What I was getting at, was that it didn’t make any difference to what I felt about it. He’d been a bit of a bounder, but I don’t think I held it against him.”
“But you must have minded,” I said. It was unbelievable.
Henry gave me a shy, puzzled look. “I suppose I must have done,” he said. “Difficult to explain. But he was making Venetia happy, you see, and I’d tried to do that and not been any good at it, so I hadn’t really a leg to stand on, had I?”
He was being too Christian and impossible for words. I said:
“He wasn’t the first, I suppose?”
Brigid gave a shocked little gasp, and said, “Oh, Paul.”
Henry shook his head, looking ashamed, and a little furtive.
“No,” he said. “It’d be silly to say that I didn’t mind at first. But once I’d seen how things were … hell! Sorry, Biddy. What could I do about it, anyway? She was just made that way, and I … I wasn’t much good to her. I hadn’t any right …”
He looked like a whipped dog.
“Henry,” said Brigid, in a choked, stupified voice, “you never told me Venetia was bad.”
He smiled at her, miserably and indulgently, and went over to her chair and patted her shoulder. She gave a low moan and seized his hand and laid her face against it.
I was pretty angry. I could feel the palms of my hands sweating, and I think my voice was a bit out of control.
“Shut up, Brigid,” I said. “Of course she wasn’t bad. Not in that way. It wasn’t any worse than you being greedy over iced cakes. There may be a lot to forgive her for, but that isn’t one of the things.”
My heart was jumping as though I’d run a mile. I tried to light a cigarette and my hands were shaking so much that it was quite a performance.
“I’m sorry, Paul,” said Brigid, quite quietly, although she was crying.
“Oh, God,” I said. “You’re sorry! What have you got to be sorry for? Of course it was worse, much worse, than being greedy over cakes. It’s quite a different thing when you’re greedy over people. Venetia was. We all know that. Even when she didn’t want you any more she wouldn’t let you go. You know what she was doing to Adlesburg, don’t you? That poor pathetic little man that you’re so sorry for? He was going to get a job. He wouldn’t have done any more harm, he might even have done some good. She was going to ditch his chances. I don’t know how she would have done it, or whether she’d have been able to. I expect she would. She’d always got everything she wanted. Anyway, he thought she could do it, and that finished him. And you know why she got you to come here, don’t you, Brigid? Why she was so ‘nice’to you? So you could keep Henry occupied while she carried on with her lover. She didn’t have any sudden impulse of friendliness towards you … she …”
I realised that I was shouting; I was conscious of Henry’s startled eyes, and I felt rather ashamed.
Henry said, “Sit down, old chap. There’s no need to get worked up. I’ll get you a drink.”
He got me a whisky. Then he said, “You’re wrong, you know, about Venetia. Partly wrong, anyway. I don’t think that was the idea at all.”
There was a look in his eyes that made me think he knew what he was talking about. I wanted him to explain, but he didn’t seem to be going to, and I didn’t feel well enough to make him.
He said, “I didn’t know about Adlesburg. How did you find out?”
“He told me,” I said. “The night after Venetia died. He was here, in the house.”
I thought he’d want to know more about that, but he didn’t ask. He watched me drink the whisky, and said:
“That was pretty bad of her, I think.” He said it unemotionally, almost casually.
The world had stopped whirling; I felt a bit sick, but that was the whisky, and I could see clearly now.
Brigid said, “If A
dlesburg has run away … if Venetia was going to do that to him … though I can’t believe it, because it seems such a dreadful thing to do, especially if … if she was in love with him … then perhaps he killed her.”
It was the first time that any one of us had said aloud that Venetia had been murdered. It wasn’t a very pleasant moment. Brigid put her hand up to her mouth as though she could shut the stable door after the horse had bolted. I thought about Brigid’s mouth being a stable door, and the word she had said, a horse, or should it be horses? The whole thing seemed quite ludicrous and quite extraordinarily funny, so that I found I was laughing weakly, and out loud, with Brigid and Henry watching me alarmedly.
Henry said, “Don’t worry, Biddy. It’s just as well you said that, in a way. I mean, we’ve all been thinking it, just lately, and if Adlesburg has slipped off … well … it’s a possibility, after all. I mean, if she was killed, someone must have done it. I don’t say he did, of course … but there is a possibility …”
“Don’t you mean a chance?” I said. Henry was trying to do the impossible. I could see his solid British background hating the idea of condemning anyone without a jury, and yet longing to have something definite to point to on a horizon of nameless shapes.
He stood there, struggling with himself, and then he said, “It’s the police’s business. Not ours. Don’t think we make it any better by talking about it. Have another drink?”
I thought we must look very odd, a respectable English household sitting round the fire in the middle of the afternoon, drinking whisky instead of tea, and talking about murder. I wondered what we should have done if there hadn’t been any whisky.
Henry said, changing the subject heavily, “Walker thinks Sebastian should get away for a bit.”
“Away?” I said.
Henry nodded. “My sister lives in Cheshire,” he said. “Got a family of great roaring kids. Walker says the kid would be better away, and it seems an obvious place to send him.”
“It seems a bit late in the day,” I said.
Henry looked at me thoughtfully. “I’d been thinking it was a good idea for a long time,” he said.
