Five Roundabouts to Heaven

by John Bingham

  She would be all right on that. If he earned more money, he would give her a share of that, too. He’d be generous all right. She never would be able to reproach him on that score. Then she would divorce him, and he would be able to start afresh with Lorna. Just the two of them, together, for always.

  Beatrice was a strong character really; she just had moments of weakness; but Lorna needed him and he needed Lorna. Beatrice would be hurt, which was a pity, but she wouldn’t live in a wilderness of loneliness as Lorna would without him. Lorna wasn’t as strong as Beatrice.

  Beatrice would go out into the world again and, with her indomitable courage, carve out a new life for herself, probably a far better life than she had led with him. He felt queasy as he thought how, through a total misjudgement of the situation, he had so nearly placed himself within reach of the law. After all, however clever you were, there was always a chance that you would be caught.

  “There’s always the risk,” he murmured, “there’s always the risk.”

  By the time he had driven up to the door of his block of flats, he knew that what he had decided to do must be done quickly. He knew himself, at least to some extent.

  In two days he was going up north again. In Manchester he would write Beatrice a letter explaining things. He would praise her to the skies, and the praise would not be unmerited. He would take all the blame upon himself, blacken himself, castigate his own weakness.

  There would be no criticisms, no reference to previous quarrels, no harking back to grievances and past disappointments, no suggestion at all that since she had married with her head rather than her heart she was at least partly to blame.

  Then he would simply not come back.

  Knowing himself, he knew that he might weaken if he came back, and if she cried and implored him to give the marriage another chance. He wouldn’t risk it.

  As it was late, he left the car in front of the house and went upstairs to the flat. He let himself in quietly, and switched on the light in the hall, and glanced casually at the letters on the hall table.

  There was a Final Demand from the gas company, a document from the authorities telling him that unless he appealed he would be summoned for jury duty, and a bill from the local garage: a fairly representative selection of letters, in fact. He stuffed them in his overcoat pocket. Before he left, he would clear up all outstanding bills; he would leave her clear, able to make a clean start.

  He made his way to the kitchen and cut himself a thick slice of bread and cheese, and ate margarine with the bread to economize the butter ration. Beatrice did not like margarine.

  There was three-quarters of a pint of milk in the refrigerator. He poured himself out a cup, then realized that there would not be enough left for coffee for breakfast. Beatrice preferred coffee to tea. He poured the milk back into the bottle, and replaced it in the refrigerator, and quenched his thirst with water.

  It made him feel like a man apologizing for stepping upon the toe of an individual into whose back he was shortly to plunge a stiletto.

  Bartels went into the drawing room, and stood by the embers of the fire which Beatrice had made up for him. He looked around the room, noting objects which linked him to the past.

  There was the picture of the Seine which he and Beatrice had bought in Paris while on their honeymoon, upon which, indeed, they had spent more money than they could afford. There was the set of porcelain horses Beatrice had bought while visiting a friend in Belgium. And the Victorian silver picture frame, holding a picture of Beatrice as a girl: the first thing they ever bought for their home.

  He looked at these things, trying to resurrect from the ashes of his emotions some tiny flicker of sentiment. But there was nothing left; it was all dead, grey, unstirring, and without warmth. He saw only a painting, some china objects, and a frame with a good-looking girl in it.

  He threw the remains of his cigarette into the grate and began to undress in the drawing room, as he always did when he was late, in order not to disturb Beatrice. He went into the bedroom in his shirt and underpants, and quietly slipped them off and put on his pyjamas.

  Beatrice had left the gas-fire burning, half turned up, and he turned it up higher and stood by it, warming his hands and feet.

  By the light of the fire, he could make out the two twin beds, side by side. Beatrice was asleep, lying on her back, one arm above her head, as though she had found the room and the bedclothes too hot. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, he saw something white on the small table by his bedside, and moved silently across to see what it was.

  It was a mince pie. Under the mince pie was an envelope addressed to him in Beatrice’s handwriting. On the envelope she had written: “Eat the pie, and read the letter.”

  Bartels ate the pie. It was freshly made and crumbly. He knelt by the fire and opened the letter. The slight noise caused Beatrice to stir. She murmured his name sleepily.

  “I’m back,” he replied softly.

  She said something he could not catch, and turned over on her side and fell asleep again. He opened out the letter and read:

  Darling Barty,

  The beginning of the year is the time for other new beginnings. I know I have often been other than that which you wanted in your heart, though you have never said so. But I have done my best for you, darling. I will try to be better still. You have made me very happy over the years, and I want you to know how I appreciate it. I’ve made some more pies. Hope you liked this one!

  Your own Beatrice.

  He folded the letter and put it back in its envelope, and placed the envelope on the mantelpiece. He thought: Tomorrow evening I must go out. I can’t stay at home. If I stay at home I shall weaken. I must make some kind of excuse. I must get out tomorrow evening.

  He turned the fire out and climbed into bed, and drew the sheets up to his chin and lay staring into the darkness. All his movements had been slow and noiseless, but the slight creak of the bed disturbed Beatrice.

  She thrust her hand through the bedclothes, and out of her bed, and fumbled for Bartels’ hand. She found, not his hand, but his forearm, which seemed to be sufficient, for she sighed, as if with content, and dropped off to sleep again.

  Bartels lay still, rigid, as the old turmoil of fear and pain and confusion gripped his stomach, and spread up his body to his throat. Then the pain and the fears dispersed, and only the confusion remained, and withdrew to his brain whence it had originated, and remained there a while, circulating round and round and round.

  He kept it there as long as he could, fighting against certainty, because so long as there was confusion there was no decision, and so long as there was no decision there was no action, and without action there was safety.

  But the uncertainty dispersed, too, in the end, as he knew it would.

  So that he had to face the truth. It was not as though she were awake and play-acting. She had been three parts asleep. It had been an instinctive, almost subconscious action. The movement of the hand, with its groping, fumbling action, had wiped out the memory of the imaginary argument with the police constable. It had removed all the comfortable hopes.

  He was not even back where he was. It was worse. There was no escape now, no more reasons for delay, no excuses which the hand of Beatrice, reaching out for him in the darkness, had not placed far beyond his reach.

  I do need you: that’s what the hand had said. I may seem tough and self-reliant, and competent, but I’m not. I’m glad when you come back. I may not love you as you would like to be loved, but I need you. I’m glad when you return, because I don’t like being left alone. Fundamentally, I’m unhappy and unsure when I’m alone. Always come back to me. I do my best, I can’t do more, so don’t ever leave me. I would be so lonely, so frightfully lonely inside me, and so cold.

  Bartels stared up into the darkness, his wrist gripped by the hand of Beatrice, fighting the old hopeless forlorn fight against the waves of pity.

  Once, he tried, with infinite care, to disengage him
self, but Beatrice sensed his intentions through her sleep, and tightened her grip. So he continued to lie on his back, while the certainty of what he must do grew stronger in his mind.

  Because it was a cold night, the hand which gripped his wrist grew cold as the hand of a dead woman, or the hand of a woman to whom death had now come very close, even though there were, in fact, some days to go before 26 February.

  Chapter 9

  Two days later, travelling by a very early train, Bartels went to Manchester, as he had planned. In the evening, he sat in the writing room of his hotel. He felt cold, tired, and dispirited. The room was curiously named, because there were no pens, no writing paper, no blotting paper, and the inkwells were dry. But there were a few shoddy desks, and if you asked, they would reluctantly give you a few cheap sheets of headed notepaper at the reception desk.

  There was a smouldering fire in the grate, but in spite of the fire the room was chilly, and a raw wind hammered periodically at the windows.

  Round the grate sat three other commercial travellers. Bartels, trying to compose a letter to Beatrice, was distracted by their conversation.

  Two of the men were in their thirties, thin, sharp-featured, red-faced fellows. The third was about fifty, a pale-faced man with a bald head and signs of exophthalmic goitre. Their talk ranged from world politics and the atom bomb to the current trade position.

  Later, one of the men dropped his voice and began to talk about somebody called Fred with whom the three had been drinking earlier.

  Fred, it appeared, was unfaithful to his wife, and he was regarded with amused admiration by the three before the fire. They related the various excuses he made to his wife, and laughed at his astuteness. Fred was a bit of a dog.

  Bartels wondered why they bothered to lower their voices, since every word was audible to him. He also wondered why they thought Fred was so clever.

  Fred wasn’t clever. Anyone with half a brain could deceive his wife, provided his wife was a normal, trusting individual. What was clever about pulling the wool over the eyes of somebody who trusted you? What’s so frightfully bloody clever about that? thought Bartels irritably. Children can do it. Even dogs.

  He felt like throwing down his pen and shouting: “What do you oafs know about the inner subtleties of deception, of the deceiver who suffers more than the deceived? You clods! You sit here, crouched round the fire, smirking and leering, and what do you know of the pain of the imagination? You, who snigger like smutty-minded schoolboys, what right have you to gabble about infidelity?”

  He pictured the look on their faces as they swung round at his words. Indignation at the insults, first, then a strained look as they tried to puzzle it all out, and then, of course, the reproaches:

  “Excuse me, old man; but this happens to be a private conversation.”

  “No need to be insulting, old man.”

  “Who are you, anyway, to come butting in?”

  He picked up his pen, and began to write, trying so to concentrate on his thoughts as to exclude the talk around the fire.

  Dearest Beatrice, he wrote, but above the rattle of the window-panes, he heard the fat man’s wheezy voice:

  “So Fred says without a second’s hesitation, “All right, dear,” he says, “if you don’t believe I stayed there, ring ’em up and ask ’em, write to ’em, do what you like, dear, if you don’t believe me,” and then the three pips goes and he cuts off with a quick goodbye. Of course, he knew she wouldn’t have the nerve.”

  A louder gust of wind rattled the windows and drowned the rest. Bartels gazed at the notepaper. Dearest Beatrice. The lout Fred was a fool; otherwise his wife would not be suspicious. You can deceive your wife for years and years, thought Bartels drearily, if you’re not a boorish, ham-fisted clot like Fred. There must have been a time when Fred’s wife was as trusting as Beatrice.

  Bartels sighed.

  He crumpled the sheet of notepaper up because he had smudged it, and took another, and wrote a brief letter to Beatrice saying that he hoped to be back on the next day but one.

  Then he went up the narrow, winding staircase to his room at the top of the hotel. The room was cheerless and sordid, a measure, he supposed, of his own lack of success as a wine salesman. He wondered why they couldn’t take him off the road, give him a job in the office. He’d be all right in the office. He was no good on the road. Hadn’t got the aggressiveness, the smooth talk, the self-confidence.

  Sometimes he asked himself why they sent him out at all. Did they, too, suffer from pity, and talk behind his back, and say: “Poor old Barty, he’s no good, of course, but we can’t sack him. Had a hard time, in the war, you know. Keeps our name before the buyers, but that’s about all.”

  He felt the blood mounting to his face as, for one moment, he wondered whether Lorna Dickson’s feelings, also, were based on pity. He thrust the thought from him, and gazed round the room, noting despondently the mass-produced furniture, the linoleum-covered floor with the narrow strip of carpet by the bed, the windowpanes of frosted glass so that you could not see out of them, and the one harsh electric-light bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling.

  There you had it all within four walls, the furnishings of failure, the symbols of the commercial traveller who was no good, who never had been any good, and who, despite all his efforts, never would be any good.

  He undressed in the freezing, unheated room and crawled into bed, and lay in the darkness. He thought of the lout Fred, who was so devoid of finesse that he was hard put to it to lull the suspicions of his wife, and he wondered what the wife was like. Did she sit by her fireside, alone, bitter, and in tears, the unwanted woman; or pace up and down, up and down, like the wife of the former district commissioner used to do in the house in Melville Avenue?

  He turned over on to his side. A chambermaid, with unexpected zeal, had placed a stone hot-water bottle in the bed. He pressed his feet harder against it to gather the warmth.

  He thought that although she didn’t realize it, Fred’s wife had little to worry about. Fred would grow tired of his bits of stuff. Fred would always come home in the end. All the Freds in all the world would always come home in the end. But I’m different, he thought. For me there is no lighthearted dalliance; there never could be, because if you’ve got any imagination you can’t just love ’em and leave ’em; not if they’re sensitive, and if they’re not sensitive you don’t fall for them.

  The warm air from the bottle and from his body, trapped within the bedclothes, slowly surrounded him, soothing his nerves and lulling the agitation in his mind.

  He was comfortable now, warm and comfortable, and had no wish to fall asleep. Instead, he wished to stay awake a while with the image of Lorna before his mind’s eye, to feel in imagination the softness of her lips and the silkiness of her shoulders beneath his hand.

  But the day’s events intruded. It had been a bad day, of course; there was nothing unusual about that. Buyers had been obstinate, some even refusing to see him. There ran through his mind the old time-honoured excuses which he had heard so often over the years:

  “Mr Fowler asks if you will excuse him this time, as he is very busy.”

  “Mr Roberts has the auditors with him and regrets he cannot see you.”

  “Mr Martin is in the middle of stocktaking, and is sorry he cannot have the pleasure of seeing you on this occasion.”

  “Very nice of you to call. Mr Andrews has asked me to say, however, that he is well satisfied with his present suppliers and sees no reason to change.”

  The list of his wines ran through his head. Once he had thought them colourful and romantic. Even now they had a lilt about them, though, as he grew sleepier, the music was interrupted with snatches of his own sales talk, with thoughts of Lorna and Beatrice, and quantities and prices, and still more sales talk…St Emilion, St Julien, Bordeaux Rouge; Medoc, Beaune, Pommard; Chambertin, Beaujolais Superieur-“we have a most interesting parcel of Beaujolais.”

  A most interesting parcel
of Beaujolais, and at a keen price, and just the thing for your clientele. A full-bodied wine for the North, and Lorna came from the North…I love you, Lorna; I love you, Barty; I shall understand if it’s too hard, Barty, I shall understand…Bordeaux Rouge, Pommard, Medoc…Lorna, darling Lorna, don’t say that you, too, suffer from pity?…Lorna, my love…Cut the commission. Five percent on bulk wines. Two hogsheads, four hogsheads, eight hogsheads, and quarter bottles to contend with high restaurant prices.

  Quarter bottles, a mixed case of eight quarter bottles, and pamphlets and a map for the Bordeaux wines. Of interest to customers, a help to the waiter! The trend to expect is a rise in Burgundies…It’s not what a man does, or even whether he succeeds, it’s how he does it that counts said Lorna once…Dear, sweet Lorna…A narrow market, a narrow market, wine fifteen shillings, duty twenty-six shillings, three-and-six freight and insurance, ten shillings bottling, price in bin fifty-four-and-sixpence, and a most interesting parcel of Beaujolais.

  One hundred gallons, forty-eight dozen, two hogsheads. Four hogsheads. Eight hogsheads. Something special in St Julien, St Emilion, Medoc, Beaune, Chambertin, Macon, and Bordeaux Rouge…Don’t ever leave me, that’s what the hand of Beatrice had said to him in the dark…I need you.

  Bartels sighed, confused, more than half asleep.

  Beaujolais…a most interesting parcel of Beaujolais…A most interesting parcel of altrapeine…Just in case…I must buy a most interesting parcel of altrapeine…Somehow…Tomorrow. Without fail. Altrapeine…of interest to the customers, a help to the waiter. Bartels smirked once, drowsily, then slept.

  Although Bartels fell asleep without too much trouble, he had a restless night disturbed by dreams. In one he was offering a sample of Beaujolais to a buyer, but he couldn’t make the wine come out of the bottle because, try as he might, he was unable to tilt the bottle to the right angle; meanwhile the buyer waited, watching and sneering.