Who Calls the Tune

by Nina Bawden

  Henry stood as if he were standing for the National Anthem. He was asked to tell the court what he had been doing on the night of his wife’s death. He said that he had stayed downstairs until everyone had gone to bed. Then he had gone round the house locking up, and he had ended up in the kitchen where he had spent half an hour or so charging the water-softener. He’d had the door closed, and anyway the softener made quite a lot of noise, so that he wouldn’t have heard anything from the rest of the house. It was about midnight when he went upstairs to go to bed. He felt too wide-awake to sleep, so he decided to have a bath. There were three bathrooms in the house; the one attached to his wife’s bedroom, the one next to the spare room, and a third on the half-landing of the stairs that led from the first floor to the unused attics. He had chosen that bathroom because it was the one he normally used anyway, and because there he was less likely to disturb anyone by running the water so late at night. I thought the coroner looked upset when he said that; he shook his head slightly, as if he were worried about something. Henry said he had taken about an hour over his bath, and then gone to bed. He had slept at once; he hadn’t heard anything out of the way, and he had slept until I had called him in the early hours of the morning.

  No one else had been asked about their movements so painstakingly; I thought it was a pity that Henry had got it all so pat.

  “When you went upstairs,” said the coroner, fiddling with his pen, “was your wife in her room?”

  “Yes,” Henry said. Then he flushed scarlet and said stumblingly, “I don’t know. I mean, I saw a light in her room. But the door was closed.”

  “You didn’t look in to say good night?”

  “No.” There was a little murmur behind me; the whole hall was stirring and uneasy.

  The coroner coughed falsely, and said, “Perhaps you will tell the court what your relations with your wife were.”

  “They were friendly,” said Henry. His lashes drooped over his eyes, and he looked, suddenly, like a sly child.

  “Even when you were each … in love with someone else?”

  “Yes.”

  “There was no question of divorce between you?”

  “No,” said Henry loudly. “There never had been. My wife had never suggested it.”

  “I see,” said the coroner. He did see; he and Henry were of the same background, the same mind. But the court had to see too. He said, “And you would not suggest it to her?”

  “Certainly not,” said Henry. He looked very gentlemanly.

  The coroner hesitated a moment. “You felt that it might not be right because of her infirmity?”

  Henry looked very angry. “That made no difference at all,” he said.

  I thought that the coroner looked very sad. I wondered if he was thinking of Venetia. Perhaps he had been in love with her too. He dismissed Henry.

  Then he talked to the jury. He sounded old and tired. He went over the evidence step by step. He said that it was clear from the evidence that Mrs. Sykes could not have died by accident. At least, he didn’t say it quite like that, but it was what he meant. He said that they must consider their verdict carefully, and not make any rash judgment. He said, in effect, that they should bring in a verdict of murder by an unknown person or persons. There was a lot more, but I didn’t listen very carefully. My head had started to ache, and my feet and hands were very cold. I felt as if my body didn’t belong to me any longer.

  The jury went out of the hall through a little door at the side of the stage, and everyone started to talk in a hushed, excited way. The coroner sat at the table, writing, and drinking from his glass of water.

  Then the jury came back. The court was silent; so still that it seemed as if everyone was holding their breath.

  The jury gave their verdict. They brought in a verdict of wilful murder against Henry Sykes.

  There was still silence; then there came a kind of long sigh in the hall. The coroner was saying something, but I didn’t hear what it was, because Rella started to cry beside me … long shuddering sobs that seemed to be torn from her body. Then everyone started to talk at once. I heard the coroner’s officer shouting for silence, but he didn’t get it. Walker came up to Henry, and there was another policeman with him. The hall was emptying rapidly; the crowd was being ushered out by two other policemen that I hadn’t seen before. They were going quite quietly, looking back over their shoulders towards us, their blurred faces looking like a bank of flowers. Then the hall was empty except for the four of us, and Walker and the policeman. I heard Henry say testily, “Yes, yes. Of course I’m coming now.”

  Walker said gently, “You can have a suitcase and things sent to you, you know.”

  He didn’t look triumphant, his sad, clerk’s face was disillusioned. I got the idea, I don’t know how, that he hadn’t expected the verdict, that it was not what he had wanted.

  Brigid said, “You’re taking him away now?”

  Walker nodded, but he didn’t look at her. He looked at me, across everyone else, as if they didn’t exist at all and only he and I were in the hall. His eyes were very bright.

  He said, “You will take the ladies home?”

  They took Henry out by a side door. Brigid kissed him before he went. She wasn’t crying; her face was creased with the effort not to cry. She kissed him as if they were married, and Henry was leaving home to go to work and would be back in the evening.

  A policeman came up to us and asked us if we would like to get out of the hall by a side door because of the crowd.

  Brigid said, “It’s all right. Our car is at the front,” and he unlocked the heavy front doors. There were a lot of people in the street, and they murmured when they saw us. We walked down the steps and into the car; Brigid went ahead, and Rella clung to my arm. A policeman opened the door of the car for us and cleared the children off the running board. As I stepped into the car, a camera flashed and I put my arm up as if to defend my face, and afterwards thought of all the photographs I had seen of people leaving police courts with their arms crooked across their faces as if to protect themselves.

  Chapter Thirteen

  When we got back to the house Dorry opened the door as soon as the car had stopped. She must have been waiting in the hall, listening for the sound of the engine. I had forgotten about Dorry, and seeing her I felt surprise, and then shock. Surprise, because she had not been asked to give evidence, and then shock because I wondered suddenly whether she had been deliberately left out. I remembered the statement she had made to Walker about Henry and Venetia, and I think I knew then, in a queer way, that Walker had not wanted the case against Henry to seem any blacker than it had to.

  I wanted to get away on my own and work that one out. But I knew I wouldn’t be able to do so, because Brigid was sure to want to start making decisions and arranging things.

  Dorry looked at the three of us, and then past us at the empty car in the drive as though she were hoping against hope. I had always thought of her as a strong sort of person, but suddenly there was no strength in her face any longer, and she was crying. Not loudly; she just put her hands to her face and sobbed into them, rocking a little on her feet. She seemed, in that moment, human and fallible, an unhappy old woman instead of a treasure and a rock.

  Brigid was watching her in a stricken way, and I knew then that she had not been expecting me to arrange things. She hadn’t been thinking of me or even been glad that I was there. She had been depending upon Dorry, expecting a cup of tea and a comforting shoulder to cry on. And here was Dorry, not behaving in character at all, but needing the tea and the shoulder herself, a quivering statue of misery standing plumb in the doorway so that none of us could get through.

  Brigid said, “Oh, Dorry,” and the two women were in each other’s arms. I steered Rella past them and shut the front door against the biting cold. The hall smelt of floor polish, a sickly, waxy smell that took me back to my childhood. I banged the door hard, and Dorry and Brigid drew apart as if the noise had brought them to th
eir senses.

  Dorry’s face was pink and swollen, but she spoke in quite an ordinary voice. “I’m sure I beg your pardon,” she said, “but it was not seeing Master Henry, and knowing what must have happened, because that’s what he’s been afraid of all along. I’ve put the kettle on, because I knew you’d like a cup of something when you came in. All that time, and nothing to eat. Master Henry … he always was upset when he didn’t get his meals regular. Been that way since he was a boy.”

  She went towards the kitchen, and Brigid followed her. From the back, they looked strangely alike. They had the same broad solidity. Rella plucked at my sleeve. She said—she hadn’t spoken for so long that her voice sounded more than usually foreign—”Let us go into the kitchen too, because it will be warm there. I am so cold.”

  She looked cold; her face was grey, and she was trembling all over. I thought she looked very ill, and it worried me, so I took her into the study and poured her a stiff whisky. She drank quickly, and coughed.

  I felt uncomfortable about her. I said, “You know, I’m awfully sorry about Tom. I mean for you. I don’t expect you’ll believe me.”

  She smiled at me like a small, wise owl. “Thank you, Paul,” she said. “But you mustn’t feel bad about not liking Tom. He wasn’t a very likeable sort of person, and he wasn’t a very happy one. Perhaps what happened was the best thing for him. He was always so much afraid. I think whatever his life had been, he would still have been afraid. He was that kind of man. Can I have some more whisky, please?”

  I filled her glass. I would have liked another myself, but I was feeling guilty because it was Henry’s house and Henry’s whisky, and they probably didn’t give you whisky in prison, so I didn’t. When Rella had finished her second glass she had lost her deathly look, so I took her to the kitchen and made her sit by the big range fire. I took off her shoes and rubbed her feet, which felt like slabs of frozen fish, until they were warm in my hand. I could see Brigid looking at me in a surprised, rather shocked way, but I didn’t care.

  Rella’s eyes were bright. She said, “Thank you, Paul. That was very kind.” Her eyes made me feel a bit of a cad, somehow, so I got up from my knees quickly and left her to put on her own shoes. Then I sat at the white, scrubbed table to drink my tea. It was a big, comfortable kitchen; in spite of its size and the flagged floor, it had the pleasant fugginess of a room that is never really cold.

  The tea was hot and sweet. Usually I hated sugar in my tea, but at that moment it was curiously comforting. I drank with my hands curved round the cup. Rella was leaning back in her chair by the fire, her eyes closed and a relaxed look about her mouth. Brigid gave her a glance and then leant across the table towards me. Her face was shiny, and I could see the coarsened pores at the side of her nose. The misery on her face made her look ugly, and I wished she would go away and bathe her eyes and powder her nose. She said, “Paul, what are we going to do?”

  I don’t think she expected me to answer, because she went on straight away, “Henry’s solicitor was at the inquest. The man who came this morning. We must get hold of him and ask him what we ought to do. Perhaps he’ll make them let Henry come home.”

  I said, “They won’t do that. He’ll have to stay in, custody until he’s committed for trial. They won’t let him out till afterwards. If he’s found not guilty.”

  She said “Oh,” in a stupid way, and her face was shocked and afraid. I don’t think she can have thought clearly about it. She must have been thinking in a muddled sort of way that what had happened at the inquest was simply a mistake that could be put right by a lawyer; that if she could only get hold of the right people, things would somehow be all right. Brigid believed in the strange, secret power of the professional classes; to her, they were infallible, like the Pope. She had not thought of the thing that had happened to Henry as being irrevocable. I was terribly afraid that she would start to cry again, so I said:

  “The lawyer fellow will find a counsel for Henry. He’ll have to stand his trial, I expect, but it’ll be all right. It would have been all right to-day, if it hadn’t been for that stupid jury. I’m sure it wasn’t the verdict the police wanted. I don’t think they have the evidence against him. And his solicitor is probably with Henry now. He’ll be doing everything he can.”

  She said, “Then there’s nothing we can do at all?”

  “I expect there’ll be plenty,” I said quickly. “Don’t worry about that. Only there isn’t much we can do at this moment. Perhaps they’ll let you see him later on.”

  I don’t think that comforted her much. She looked numb and cold, and sat staring at the white painted wall in front of her. I could hear Dorry moving about upstairs with little bumps and bangs that sounded very loud in the silence. Then, suddenly, Brigid started to talk, her face very red, and the words tumbling out in the old, uncertain way.

  “It’s so wicked, Paul,” she said. “I mean, that all this could have happened because of Venetia. It’s awful of me, I know, but I keep thinking that she would be pleased to know we’re all unhappy, and that this terrible thing has happened. She’s always had the best of things, and she has even now, in a funny sort of way. You know, Paul, after she’d lost her leg, I used to be terribly sorry for her. She was so pretty, and I used to lie awake at night and wish it had happened to me instead because I wasn’t pretty, and people never looked at me in the way they used to look at Venetia, and so it wouldn’t have mattered so much. And when she came out of hospital I went on being sorry for her a long time. I would have been sorry always, I suppose, only it wasn’t very easy. I always got into trouble for the things that she’d done, and sometimes I used to think she did things that she shouldn’t on purpose, so that I should be blamed for them. Mother was afraid of her, I think, and she was never cross with her. And if anyone had pretty clothes, it was always Venetia, even when we couldn’t afford to buy them at all. I know I shouldn’t be talking like this, and I do feel ashamed, but you can’t always keep things bottled up inside yourself.”

  I said, “Of course you can’t. And you mustn’t blame yourself for feeling bitter about it. If she made you unhappy she may not have meant to. I don’t mean that she was necessarily clumsy about that sort of thing, just that she wouldn’t have been unhappy if she’d been in your place. She wasn’t very sensitive herself and she didn’t expect other people to be.”

  “I think she did know how I felt,” said Brigid, and she sounded angry. “She did know, and she was pleased about it, because she liked to think that other people were being miserable in a way she couldn’t ever be. She was wicked underneath, Paul, only you didn’t notice it half the time, because she was so lovely and exciting. She was clever too, and so she fooled people most of the time. You, Paul, and Henry … and when she did do things that she wasn’t clever enough to hide, and people were shocked or upset, they said it was because she was a cripple, and they must make allowances. She treated Henry abominably, Paul. She was unfaithful to him with all sorts of dreadful people, and he never said anything about it, even to me, until after she was dead. But if anyone tried to say that it was her fault that she and Henry weren’t happy together, everyone would say that Venetia couldn’t be judged in the ordinary way, that she was different from other people. I thought like that, sometimes, and then she would be spiteful or unkind, and it seemed that you must be able to blame her. She was beastly to Sebastian, she was always frightening him.”

  “Was Henry worried about that?” I said. “I mean, about the way Venetia treated Sebastian?”

  She wrinkled her forehead. “I don’t know,” she said uncertainly. “He did say that he thought she might be jealous of me because I’d had a baby and she hadn’t, though I don’t think it could be that. I don’t really know what he did think. I thought she just didn’t like children. You know she never did, Paul.”

  I saw a half-frightened expression in her eyes. I said, “No, I don’t think she did. But a lot of people don’t, you know.”

  It wasn’t true, and I
think Brigid knew that I knew it wasn’t. Because she didn’t say anything for a little while, and frowned at the teapot in an unhappy way. Then she started to talk about Henry, but I didn’t listen. I was thinking about Caroline.

  She had been a nice little thing. There wasn’t anything special about her; she was a thin, lively child, with thick, light hair that always hung in her eyes. Her mother had adored her, but had always tried pathetically hard to pretend that she loved her step-children equally. She had been heartbroken when Caroline had died.

  It had happened one night in the summer. She had gone to bed in the room next to her mother’s, and in the morning she had gone. They found her in the bomb-site next to the house, lying among a pile of fallen masonry. They guessed that she had tried to climb, and fallen, but they never really knew. There had been a paragraph in the national papers, and a column in the local weekly, but she had not been raped, and enthusiasm had quickly died. Everyone had been questioned, but no one had seen her leave the house …

  Brigid was saying, “She always got away with everything, Paul,” and I realised that I was holding on hard to the rough edge of the table, and that my hands were sweating.

  Someone coughed in the doorway. It was Walker, ‘and he said, “I’m sorry … I’ve come for Mr. Sykes’s things.”

  He looked very apologetic. Brigid went white. She said, “Oh, of course …”

  “There’s no hurry,” he said politely, and stayed in the doorway, looking almost shy.

  Brigid got up quickly and left the room. I wondered why Walker had come. I didn’t know much about the way the police worked, but it seemed unusual that he shouldn’t have sent a sergeant for the suitcase. He stood, looking after Brigid, and when she had gone upstairs, he turned back to me.

  “May I come in?” he said, not looking at all apologetic now, but slightly mocking, his bright eyes alert.

  “Of course,” I said, stiffly. “Won’t you sit down?”

  “Thank you,” he said, and he sat down on the wooden chair that Brigid had vacated, and faced me across the kitchen table. I stayed standing up. I wasn’t anxious to talk to him. He looked up at me, and smiled, not mockingly now, but as if he wanted to be friends. I turned my head away, and tried to pretend that I hadn’t seen him smile, and to give myself something to do, I picked up the dirty cups from the table and carried them over to the sink. I turned on the hot tap and rinsed them clean, and stood them on the draining-board.