Angell, Pearl and Little God

by Winston Graham

  Blood thumping, she refused. But she agreed to meet him next week same time, same place. Godfrey was reasonably satisfied. He thought next week would fix it. And it did.

  The bitter knowledge that the connection had not broken came to Angell slowly. Not a particularly perceptive man except where his own feelings were involved, he had hoped that the terrible affair in Suffolk with its injuries to himself, had put Pearl off Godfrey for good. Like Godfrey he had been quick to see that her threat to leave him if he told the police carried with it an implied promise to stay with him if he didn’t. And her attention to him during his convalescence and her acceptance of his later claims had given him cause for hope.

  The slow unease was much later, a month or more later. It crept on him like a chill you have caught from being out in an east wind without an overcoat. You just can’t pick out the moment when you first know it’s there. Then a few little clues. Then a realization.

  Again, then, all over again, suffocatingly again, the agonies of deciding whether to pretend not to know. The humiliation within yourself for so pretending. But the bleak alternative. To live with her on these terms or to live without her. He had long since called Birman off Godfrey.

  If only Godfrey would be run over by a bus, or die or commit suicide. In the night sometimes he even vindictively toyed with Birman’s earlier suggestion that to get Godfrey beaten up out of the ring was much easier than to get him beaten up in. But the step into crime was something that he just could never contemplate seriously. Ethically the two acts might not be very different, but the gap for Angell was unbridgeable. And any new revenge would almost certainly bring a new reprisal in its wake.

  This really put it out. Not since those early days at his public school had Angell felt anything resembling the terror he had felt running through the library towards the blocked door. And never since then either – and not even then – had he known the physical pain of being struck hard, the hideous grinding shock of knuckle on bone, the pain, the hurt, the bruising, the injury inflicted on one’s own person by another person standing there whom one could not stop. The not knowing where the next terrible blow would fall. To fight was useless, to cry for mercy equally useless, the blind oblivion of collapse the only escape.

  And it had come soon. But those moments had left an indelible mark. If Angell had feared Godfrey before, now he was terrified. The only true safety would be to see Godfrey in prison for a long term, or emigrated to Australia.

  In the meantime Godfrey helped himself to his wife, and there was no better alternative than to pretend one didn’t know. It was insupportable, unbearable, intolerable. The worry, the jealousy, the fear, were destroying his life.

  But the present situation could continue only on the basis of this pretence. So long as everyone pretended it was not happening, life could just be lived. There were even times when it had its pleasures, and those pleasures could be heightened, like a banquet in war-time. Break the pretence and you broke the bandages on the wound.

  Chapter Twelve

  Godfrey got his third cushy fight at the Anglo-American Sporting Club in June. It was against a man called Roy Owen, who had won well in the lists a few years ago and had then gone to America. He had made big money there, but he had had too many hammerings in the process. He was a pawky fighter, not in the least interested in stopping his opponent, only in avoiding being stopped, and garnering the points on the way so that he stood a fair chance of a decision. He was the right sort of opponent for Little God, who for the first time since the Kio fight began to open up in his old style. Owen scored a fair number of times on Godfrey’s nose, but there was no dynamite in the glove, it scarcely hurt, it was just a tick in the referee’s book: it was good boxing but arid, unambitious, the sort Godfrey had always despised. In going for a knock-out now he showed his contempt and found some of the confidence he had lost.

  He did not get his knock-out but it was a narrow points decision in his favour, and the members at the dining tables clearly liked him. The fight did him more good psychologically than either of the other two.

  He left the Anglo-American Sporting Club just as soon as he could get away and drove back to Battersea where Pearl was waiting for him.

  As always after a fight his impulses were more than ever arrogant, conquesting, had elements in them of a continuing wish to destroy. Pearl bore it because sometimes in her now was a wish to be destroyed.

  When she at last said she must go he rubbed his chin: and said: ‘Why not spend the night here?’

  ‘I can’t! You must know that. I’m supposed to be visiting my family.’

  ‘D’you think he believes it?’

  ‘Well, of course! But not if I stay any longer.’

  ‘He only has to check. Just once he has to check.’

  Pearl was silent; then she slid out of bed, began hurriedly to dress. He watched her lazily.

  ‘Isn’t it right? He only has to do that.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose so. But if he doesn’t, if he still believes what I tell him—’

  ‘Why should he? I’d like to tell him to his face.’

  ‘That would be a way of getting back at me, wouldn’t it. You’d really like that.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have the guts to divorce you even then. I’d take a bet on it.’

  ‘Why do you still hate him so much? It’s over now, and you’ve recovered. You’ve only gained, in a way, by that fight – in reputation, I mean. And you’ve got me – as much as you want me …’ She stopped but he did not answer. ‘ You don’t want me for keeps, only when the fancy takes you.’

  ‘Who says I don’t want you for keeps?’

  ‘Well, for marriage.’

  ‘Oh, marriage. What’s that? A ball and chain.’

  She zipped up her skirt, opened her bag and took out a comb, began to tug at her hair. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose that’s how you see it. What’s the good of marriage when you only have to crook your finger … Isn’t that enough revenge on Wilfred?’

  He sat up in bed and licked a swelling on his lip. ‘Every time I look at myself in the mirror, Oyster. Every time.’

  ‘It might have happened in any fight.’

  ‘But it didn’t. And it wouldn’t. Know what a girl said to me the other day – girl I hadn’t seen for a year or more? “ For crying out loud, Godfrey,” she says, “who bent your hooter?”’

  Pearl struggled into her coat. ‘Did it make her any less loving?’

  He smiled, but did not speak.

  She had got to the door. ‘Sometimes I think you hate me as much as you do Wilfred.’

  ‘I don’t hate anybody,’ he said. ‘I feel real good.’

  ‘Despise, then,’ she said. ‘Perhaps that’s the word. Despise.’

  It was a sultry July, the hottest in London, the papers said, since some time or other. The three fine days and a thunderstorm of a typical English summer were repeated at intervals all through the month. St Swithin’s day, significantly, was the hottest of all.

  On it Pearl deliberately cut an appointment with Godfrey and went with Veronica Portugal to a swimming pool in Roehampton. She lay in the sun or the water all afternoon letting the impersonal warmth seep into her and the dark desire drain away. When she was away from him her blind mind stared into the dark, comprehending and recognizing nothing reasonable in her behaviour. When she was with him only the need and the fulfilment of the need existed; love was a forgotten word, hatred nearer to the root of her submission.

  This time, this time only she had broken free, exercised a puny independence, stretched damp wings, knowing that she was no freer for doing it but was only postponing; some part of her subconscious already busy in horrid fascination with the price she’d have to pay. And yet resenting it. Resenting it.

  Veronica Portugal had problems of her own with Simon, and it was clear presently that she had invited Pearl for the afternoon to use her as a confidante. Pearl didn’t mind. She listened to Veronica with a quiet, lazy detachment, asking a quest
ion here, putting in a comment there; all that was needed. Veronica’s problems seemed so simple compared with her own, so surface-borne, so upper-class, so resolvable within a limited code of behaviour. She felt she had become a savage, without roots or guidance, existing in this polite civilized matter-of-fact world but not belonging to it. Wilfred belonged to it. Godfrey sang tribal songs that only her blood understood.

  In the early evening, warm and tired and refreshed she drove home, Veronica leaving her on her doorstep. Wilfred, who had been in two hours and imagining the worst, was just in time to see Veronica driving away. The lines of petulance and distrust which so often settled on his face nowadays cleared on the instant and he brushed aside Pearl’s mild apologies and would not have her cooking at this late hour. They went out to dinner to a little place in Draycott Avenue – within walking distance; no need for a taxi – where he had heard the escargots were specially plentiful and good. Knowing his moods and his glances to the last shade, Pearl felt her contentment ebbing away into little shallow gullies of new emotion. She saw immediately ahead an event in which she would be the destroyer instead of the destroyed.

  A couple of days later Wilfred was unwell in the morning and had only just left for the office when Godfrey called. Pearl tried to prevent him from coming in but he came.

  ‘Ssh! The woman’s upstairs!’

  ‘Where was you on Wednesday?’

  ‘I – went out … with a friend, a woman friend. It was so hot.’

  ‘So you let me down.’

  ‘Yes …’ She steeled her eyes at him. ‘ You’ve done it to me.’

  He took her arm, fingering the arm through the thin silk. ‘Well, don’t do it to me again! I waited near on an hour.’

  ‘It was just the way I felt … When I waited for you I waited four hours.’

  ‘Don’t do it again. I warn you. It’s a dirty trick. When next?’

  Pearl listened for Mrs Jamieson’s footsteps.

  ‘Tuesday.’

  ‘Not before then?’

  ‘Not before then.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Usual. Three-thirty. Please go.’

  ‘O.K., O. K. Only please don’t let me down.’

  ‘I’ll please myself,’ Pearl said challengingly, just before she closed the door. But she knew this time she would go.

  Sam Windermere, the promoter, was putting on a big show at Belle Vue, Manchester, with the main fight a return contest for the Middle-weight Championship of Great Britain. Second on the bill, and nearly as big a draw, was Manchester’s own Billy Biddle against the rising new star Hay Tabard, in the Welter-weight division. Tabard was at present Jude Davis’s most precious possession. He was a tall blond young man, son of a German prisoner of war, and he looked like being the best welter-weight – or later middle-weight – prospect of his generation. He was not yet nineteen, and he drew crowds of admirers everywhere he went for his looks and for his fine promise. Jude had had splendid offers for him from two bigger managers but he was not interested in selling. He was too valuable a potential. Jude had been bringing him along cautiously. Because of his youth, two-minute rounds instead of three-minute rounds had been imposed by the B.B. B. of C., and his opponents had been carefully selected to gain him useful experience without imperilling his confidence. This was his first important fight, and it was the only one Jude had on this bill.

  Godfrey was not involved except as a sparring mate for Tabard. Nearly all Jude’s stable had been utilized from time to time: Tom Bushey, two stone heavier, and Godfrey, a stone and a half lighter, among them: Bushey for his weight, Godfrey for his speed. It gave variety to the practice rounds and all added to Tabard’s knowledge of ring-craft.

  Two or three days before a fight the sparring ended, so the Tuesday session was the last that Tabard undertook. After that it would be the bags or the ball with light shadow boxing. Godfrey had watched the blond boy a good deal and knew his merits and his weaknesses. So of course did Prince, and while Hay was a tremendous puncher for his weight, and a beautiful mover, he had defensive faults which Prince was working hard on. Hay was still vulnerable to in-fighting, and at times allowed his natural aggressiveness to lead him into trouble. Often Godfrey, who to his credit had learned a lot from his defeat, was able to land lightly on Hay’s jaw and nose from an inside position.

  On the Tuesday Davis came down to the gym in the afternoon and watched Tabard box a couple of rounds with a man of his own weight. Godfrey, who had his appointment with Pearl at 3.30, was to follow the other spar mate. For the last few days he had been carefully working something out.

  Davis watched the first round between them and then was called to the telephone. This was the moment.

  Godfrey dodged round his big opponent, trying a few left jabs and picking off some fairly hearty lefts in return. Then he invited the manoeuvre that he knew Tabard would not resist: head-feinting, a dummy move to the left and a circle to the right. It was like waving a rag at a bull, you knew it would come at you because this was what it had done before. Hay came at him, hitting him high on the forehead, and Godfrey was just going backwards enough to take the bite out of it. A fierce right he slipped over his shoulder so that Hay’s two fists were just outside the line of his body, then he uppercut him with his right.

  He’d done this before at half power, registering the point without aiming to damage. (When he landed like this Hay got a lecture from Prince.) This time he put all the power of his body and the balance of his feet and the resentment of his mind into the one blow. Hay half saw it, though his own left arm hid sight of it until too late; he jerked away and the uppercut missed his chin and caught him under the nose.

  Even with the heavy practice gloves it seemed to lift his nose half off his face. He staggered back, sagged at the knees, hit the ropes and slid into a sitting position on the canvas.

  He was not down for a moment before he was struggling to get up, but by then Prince had leapt into the ring and was bending over him and pulling off his head guard. Two other boxers were in the ring. Hay was standing up, blood flooding from his nose, crimsoning his gloves and his chest. He looked dazed and kept shaking his head, so that Prince’s efforts to plug his nose were not successful.

  Godfrey went over and began to say he was sorry. Pat Prince turned on him and told him he was a clumsy vicious little rat. Then Jude Davis came in.

  ‘It’s O.K.,’ said Tabard. ‘I’ll be O. K. in a minute. It just shook me up. I’m O.K.’

  ‘Sorry, Hay,’ said Godfrey. ‘I didn’t mean it like that: you just walked into it.’

  ‘It’s O.K., I tell you. We was sparring fair enough. Yeh, I walked into it. I’ll be O.K.’

  ‘Let me see,’ said Davis. ‘ Bring a chair, Martin. Sit down Hay. Let me see.’

  ‘Keep your head still, for Pete’s sake,’ snarled Prince, trying to get the swab up Hay’s nostril. ‘You little louse, you,’ he said to Godfrey, ‘get out of my light!’

  ‘Well, stone me!’ said Godfrey, all injured innocence, ‘I was supposed to be boxing, wasn’t I? He walked into me like you walk into a wall.’

  ‘Get Doc Wright,’ Jude Davis said quietly.

  ‘He was too little and too quick,’ Tabard said. ‘If he’d been my own size, I’d not have been open the way I was. See.’

  ‘Sorry, Hay.’

  ‘O.K., God, you wasn’t to know.’

  Tom Bushey had gone in to telephone the doctor. Jude Davis looked across at Godfrey, but the light on his glasses hid his expression. Pat Prince had at last managed to get plugs in the injured nose, but it was already swollen and he was in a good deal of pain. Bushey came out and said the doctor would be along in a quarter of an hour. Godfrey got Bushey to untie his gloves for him, then he put a towel round his shoulders and stood watching the scene.

  Though careful to keep his face expressionless, his heart was seething with joy. He didn’t know whether Hay’s nose was broken, but anyway he would not be fighting on Friday night. There were ways after all o
f getting back at Jude Davis without fighting Jude himself. And more than that, who could blame a spar mate for injuring a man twenty-two pounds heavier? It would do Hay no good when it got out, and that was a pity because he was not a bad kid. But it would do him, Godfrey, good with everyone except Jude and Pat. And they could stuff it. Jude would miss his big match on Friday and his darling boy would have a nose like an electric bulb by then. And Godfrey’s name, for all Jude might do, would be talked about in the circles where it mattered.

  The doctor came but couldn’t pronounce till he’d had an X-ray. Godfrey wanted to slip off but Jude made him stay till the very end, so that it was four o’clock before he could get away. During it all Jude had only spoken three sentences to Godfrey. The first was: ‘ Stay around.’ The second was: ‘Give him air, you’ve done enough.’ The third was: ‘You can clear out now.’

  Godfrey ‘ cleared’. He slid into his Velox and gunned the engine and forced his way out into the traffic, so that the taxi drivers swore at him. He made the V-sign back. He was feeling good. This had done him more good than anything since the Kio fight. He was feeling wonderful, as good as after a top win in the ring. The last effects of the defeat were gone. He knew he was on his way up again and on his way up for keeps this time. The Kio defeat had not destroyed him, it had tempered him, taught him, matured him. He knew all there was to know now. If Jude Davis did not get him the right fights he’d make a fuss and change stables. Little God would be known everywhere as an awkward customer but a coming champion. Managers would swallow a lot to handle a winner. Even his face didn’t matter so much now.