Five Roundabouts to Heaven

by John Bingham

  The remainder of the evening was for me a mad rush, a happy whirl of laughter, and food and wine and fast driving.

  I drove up to Lorna’s cottage and braked the car violently and blew three long blasts on the horn, and leaped out and rang the bell incessantly.

  She came to the door.

  “Why, hello,” Lorna said. “What’s the uproar about? Are you on fire, or-”

  I did not let her finish. I grabbed her by the hand, and pulled her into the house, and slammed the door.

  “Come on!” I cried. “Come on, throw some town clothes on, and get cracking. We’re going up to town, to celebrate!”

  “Celebrate what, for heaven’s sake?” she said, and laughed.

  “We’ll decide that on the way. Come on, girl, dash up and change into something that isn’t evening dress. Let no time be wasted, Lorna Dickson; this is no night for a girl to be on her own in a house in the country!”

  “What’s special about tonight?” she asked, as I pushed her towards the stairs.

  “Nothing’s special about tonight. No beautiful girl should ever be alone at night. ’Tisn’t safe. Go on. Up you go!”

  “But what are we going to do?” she protested.

  “One, dash up to London, and have a quick drink and a smoked salmon sandwich. Two, dash in and see a revue, or what’s left of it by the time we get there. Three, dash out of the revue, and have some supper and see a cabaret. Four, dash down here again. OK?”

  “But you can’t drive me all the way home again!”

  “Who can’t?”

  “You can’t. You won’t get home till about four in the morning.”

  “That’s right,” I said happily. “That’s quite right. Now go and change, and stop arguing.”

  She hesitated. Then she turned and ran lightly up the stairs.

  “I’ll be ten minutes,” she said over her shoulder.

  “Too long,” I called after her. “Cut it down to seven. The horses will get cold.”

  She put her head over the banisters. “If the coachman wants a drink, he can help himself.”

  “The coachman will.”

  That is one of the memories I shall always retain of Lorna: her head over the banisters, her grey-blue eyes dancing with the fun of unexpected pleasure.

  Loneliness on her part, rush tactics on my part: that’s what I had gambled on. I was giving her no chance to wonder if Bartels would mind; no chance to wonder anything at all, if it comes to that.

  I did well that evening.

  I suppose it was the first expensive evening out she had enjoyed for a long time. Bartels had certainly insufficient money to do what Lorna and I did that evening. It was laughter all the way, except towards the end of the drive home.

  We had turned off the Kingston Bypass, and driven through Esher, and had just turned the sharp bend beyond Esher, when I asked Lorna if she would care to come out again the following week and see another show.

  She said nothing, but it was easy enough to guess what she was thinking. So I said it for her:

  “I don’t suppose Barty would mind.”

  “He might be a little-envious. He is such a generous chap, but of course he can’t afford evenings like this. And I wouldn’t want him to. I think he might be a bit hurt, you know.”

  I accelerated and passed a lorry, then dropped speed to an easy forty-five.

  “I’m not quite sure whether Barty has the right to feel hurt,” I said flatly.

  “Meaning?”

  “You know as well as I do, Lorna.”

  “Yes,” she said softly. Then again: “Yes.”

  Her hand was lying on the seat beside me. I placed my left hand over it, and said: “You know, my dear, Barty is a terrific romantic. He is always-looking for perfection.”

  I gave her hand the merest suggestion of pressure, and replaced my own on the wheel.

  “Always looking for it? Do I gather that you are trying to tell me that I am not the result of his first search?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. Perhaps. Perhaps not. If I knew, I wouldn’t tell you. It’s none of my business. It’s no concern of mine.”

  Lorna remained quiet. She had not removed her hand from the seat, but I let it lie there, while I played my last important card.

  “Besides,” I said casually, “he will have to consider the effect of anything he may do upon Beatrice’s health.”

  I saw Lorna look at me suddenly, but I kept my eyes on the road ahead.

  “Her health?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s wrong with her health? Barty never told me there was anything the matter with her health.”

  Poor Lorna! I could guess how the icy fingers of doubt and fear were beginning to grip her by the throat. I longed to stop the car and take her in my arms and comfort her. There was nothing wrong with Beatrice’s health, of course. Fundamentally, she was as sound as a bell, though once she had had slight palpitations of the heart through taking too many aspirins.

  “I don’t think,” I said carefully, “that her heart is as strong as it could be. Nothing serious,” I added hastily, for if you wish to add an air of truth to a statement it is as well to soft-pedal it.

  Then it sounds plausible. Suckers believe it.

  “I see,” said Lorna slowly. “I didn’t know that. I didn’t know. He never told me that.”

  “Oh, didn’t he?” I answered. “He probably didn’t think it necessary. It’s nothing serious, you know.”

  After a while, as she said nothing, I said:

  “On the whole, I would rather you didn’t mention it to Barty. He might think I was interfering.”

  “I think I must mention it. It makes a difference.”

  “I wouldn’t like to quarrel with him, Lorna. We’ve been friends since boyhood. I rather wish I hadn’t told you now. But I thought you knew, of course.”

  She thought for a few moments. “All right,” she said at length. “I won’t mention it. Thank you for telling me.”

  When I dropped her at her home, she asked me in for a final drink. But I declined. I said goodbye to her on the doorstep.

  She was smoking a cigarette. I said to her: “May I have that cigarette you’re smoking?”

  “If you wish. Why?”

  “Because it has touched your lips,” I said.

  Corny, of course. I had heard a Swede say it once in Stockholm.

  Still, it worked. She smiled gently, and held it out. I took it and put it to my own lips, and touched my hat with a semi-military salute and turned away and climbed into my car and drove off. It had been a most satisfactory evening, and I felt cheerful all the way back.

  Poor old Bartels! It was like taking candy from a child. Easy, dead easy, I thought.

  Chapter 13

  It was twilight now, but the air remained hot and still in the woods above the chateau. So still that I could hear movements in the house, and even the plop as a frog dived off the side of the moat into the water.

  There was an occasional rustle in the woods around me, and once or twice a whirring of wings, ending in a flutter at tree-top level, as a belated pigeon arrived to roost. Once, too, I heard a thin, shrill squeal, which ended abruptly as the victim died.

  A black-and-white cat came softly down a path, paused when it saw me, and stood stock still, and then turned off swiftly and silently into the undergrowth.

  Across the moat, in the chateau, a figure moved in the drawing room, and oil lamps were lit, and I saw it was a woman, probably a village woman who helped in the house. Doubtless she was expecting the Americans shortly to return.

  In my day, there would have been dancing now.

  I saw the room filled with young people in evening dress. Slow-moving old Hans, again, dancing with Mary, the American; big Norwegian Rolf dancing with little blonde Paulette, a daughter of the house; Bob, from Bradford, talking about money with Freddie the bank clerk in a corner. And Ingrid, dressed in her blue-grey dress, sitting on a sofa by herself, her dress match
ing her eyes, her soft brown hair outlined against the cream walls. Ingrid whom I had lost through my own sad folly. Ingrid, my first love.

  I heard the gramophone playing “My Blue Heaven.” Our tune, we called it. So strong was the image which I formed that I half rose from the log upon which I was sitting, to go to her and say: “May I dance?” And lead her on to the floor, and feel her soft hand in mine, and whisper: “Our tune, darling.”

  I felt the gentle pressure of her hand, and saw the misty light in her eyes, and heard her say: “I’m glad you asked me in time. Before anybody else.”

  I looked for Bartels, but he was not there. Not there any longer. Not on the terrace, either. Nor in his bedroom.

  “Bartels!” I whispered in the silence of the wood. “Barty, where are you, old cock?”

  But though the picture was becoming clearer in some respects, in others the present was mingling with the past.

  Therefore it was natural that 26 February was suddenly upon me, and as my heart beat faster, Bartels should no longer be there; not at the chateau, where he and I were happy together.

  For I killed Philip Bartels, and I don’t regret it, either. At least, I don’t think I do.

  Chapter 14

  Winter or summer, Beatrice woke early, and would lie in bed thinking or reading until about 7.15. Then she would get up and make the early morning tea, and wait impatiently until she heard, first the newspapers arrive, and after that the letters.

  In the early days of her marriage she had tried without success to engage Bartels in conversation with her; she would read items from the newspaper, or from letters, express her opinions in her own forthright way, and await his response.

  After a while, she gave it up as a bad job.

  Bartels would lie half asleep, allowing his cup of tea to grow cold upon the bedside table; occasionally, if he could not avoid it, he would make a monosyllabic reply and then fall half asleep again.

  But on the morning of 26 February, he was awake before Beatrice.

  For a while he lay in the darkness of that winter’s morning, not moving for fear of awakening her, thinking over what he would do, and, in particular, how he would do it.

  It is customary among people of a certain school of thought to say that all murderers must be mentally unbalanced to a greater or lesser degree; poor fellows who are in need of hospital treatment rather than punishment.

  I do not consider myself at all unbalanced, and I am quite sure that on the morning of 26 February, Bartels was as sane and cool-brained as anybody else. He had a slightly neurotic fear of moths, dead or alive, and he suffered from a fear of confined spaces, but that is all; and there is not the shadow of a doubt that Philip Bartels came to the decision he did because he was brought up among relations who were so occupied with their own curious interests that they could spare no time to give him the love he needed.

  Beatrice could not give it to him; Lorna could. So to Bartels, unable to inflict suffering upon man or woman or beast, there was only one possible way out. The only point he had not decided yet was how exactly he would do it.

  He lay in bed thinking, quite calm now, because to a man like Bartels turmoil comes from indecision. He glanced at the luminous dial of his watch, and saw that the time was nearly seven o’clock. He reached up and switched on the light above his bed, and glanced across at Beatrice.

  She lay sleeping quite peacefully. He thought dispassionately that this was possibly the last morning when he would see her thus, and he tried to arouse within himself some spark of sentiment.

  But the only thoughts that came to his mind were that some day she would have to die, that for her the prolongation of life, perhaps into the feebleness and decay of old age, held no advantages in the long run. For Beatrice to fall asleep, without fear and in the bloom of life, involved no hardship for her.

  The alternative for her, as he saw it, was to suffer the loneliness and humiliations of the abandoned wife; he was too fond of her to allow that to happen.

  So his thoughts ran, while Beatrice slept on.

  At seven o’clock he got up, moving quietly and with stealth, and went into the kitchen and made the early morning tea. He brought the little tray back, and set it on the table by the side of the bed, and gently shook her.

  She stirred, and rubbed her eyes and looked at him. Her red hair lay spread out on the pillow. She was wearing a low-cut green nightdress, and the flesh of her arms glowed pink in the light from his bedhead.

  She looked young and childlike, tousled with sleep. He thought she looked, indeed, rather beautiful, noting the fact in an unemotional way, and glad that the kind of protective emotional covering which he had assumed prevented the fact from touching his heart.

  “Barty? What’s the matter?”

  He smiled. “Nothing’s the matter. I just thought I would get the tea, for a change. A kind of treat for you.”

  “Good heavens. How nice of you, my dear.”

  “Miracles never cease, do they?”

  He smiled back at her, and poured out two cups of tea. Beatrice sat up in bed, and took her cup and began to sip it.

  “You look rather lovely, you know.”

  “Thank you, Barty. Praise indeed.”

  “Like one of those advertisements you see in magazines. Drink a cup of Slumbo and get eight hours’ sleep and be a beauty like me.”

  He talked to her for a while, about this and that, for he knew she liked to chat in the early morning, and he was particularly anxious that she should enjoy herself that morning.

  After a while, he heard the rustle of the morning papers being thrust through the letter box. He went out to fetch them, and when he returned he handed one to Beatrice, and opened one himself, sitting on the side of her bed.

  For two or three minutes he sat reading and smoking. Then, his cigarette finished, he reached forward to extinguish it in the ashtray on the table by the side of Beatrice’s bed. As he did so, he noticed the bottle of indigestion powder, and the glass on a saucer, and the teaspoon.

  He straightened himself, and stared at the bottle. It was nearly empty. Slowly and carefully he began to think round the idea which had occurred to him, much as a cat will peer and cautiously sniff at a plate of food suddenly presented to it.

  “Nothing in the paper,” said Beatrice, continuing to read it just the same. She yawned.

  Bartels said nothing. He was trying to remember two things. One was how big a dose Beatrice took of the powder, and the other was how often she took it when she had her periodic bouts of mild digestive trouble.

  He reckoned there were about four teaspoonsful left in the bottle, and as far as he could recall, having once or twice mixed it for her, she took two teaspoonsful at a time.

  Altrapeine was tasteless. That is what the medical book had said. So was the medicine Beatrice took. But was altrapeine really tasteless, or was it a comparative term?

  He remembered the dog Brutus. The dog had taken it without trouble. But in that case the powder had been embedded into the meat, and when it came to meat the dog wolfed each piece almost without biting it. It was hardly a fair test.

  Supposing he put double the necessary quantity into the bottle, since there were two doses of powder left, and supposing he did not mix the two powders evenly, so that Beatrice took a dose of almost pure altrapeine, would she notice it?

  It would be too late, of course, because she always gulped her medicine down, but if she noticed a strange taste-and she had an extraordinarily delicate palate-and then began to lose consciousness, she would be afraid.

  She would not suspect him, but she would be afraid. She would think, in the seconds before she died, that the chemist had made a mistake: one read about such mistakes. She would die in fear.

  He remembered her fear when she had had her slight attack of palpitations. Her first worried little remark, early one morning: “I feel funny, Barty. I wish I hadn’t taken those aspirins.” And a few minutes later, the piteous little cry of real alarm: “Barty, I do
feel queer; my heart’s beating terribly quickly, and I can’t seem to get my breath.”

  He had calmed her down, only to hear her call out again a few moments later. She had rushed to the window and flung it open, and gulped down the air, and turned and clung to him with terror in her eyes, and cried; “Barty, Barty!” and then again, “Barty, Barty!”

  Then, while he telephoned the doctor, she had gone and put her head under a cold-water tap, and had kept moving about the flat, always with fear in her eyes, crying, “I think I’m better if I keep moving! I seem to be better if I keep moving!”

  It had been nothing serious, of course. She had simply knocked off aspirins and taken to phenacetin tablets instead, and had never had an attack since. Her heart was as sound as a bell.

  But he remembered how he thought, in agony of mind: Not this way, dear God, not by death. Oh, God, don’t give me my freedom through her death!

  It had changed since then. Now he not only desired her death: he was plotting it. Now it was freedom by death, yes, but not freedom by death and fear. Not that. He would wait a week, a month, a year, rather than that.

  He lifted the teapot and looked at Beatrice.

  “Care for another cup?” he asked.

  “Yes, please. Not quite so much sugar this time, please.”

  Beatrice answered without looking up from her paper. She was lying back smoking and reading. Soon, as Bartels knew, she would put down her paper and start talking about her plans for the day.

  “Been having indigestion again?” he asked. “I see you’ve been taking your stuff.”

  “Oh, nothing much. I’ve had one or two twinges in the night lately. That’s all.”

  “How often do you take the stuff?”

  Beatrice had a habit of becoming so deeply immersed in her reading that she was unable to hear questions put to her. So it was now. She did not answer.

  “How often do you take it?” said Bartels again, more loudly. “Twice a day? Three times?”

  Beatrice leant over and extinguished her cigarette in the tray. “Oh, no. I’m just taking it before I go to bed for a few days. I’ll have to get some more.”