‘Come, come,’ said the policeman, and drew from Peter’s breast-pocket a couple of letters. One envelope was addressed ‘The Hon. Peter Luckles, 13b Shepherd Market w.1,’ the other, in a less literate hand, ‘Hon. Luckles, White Barn, Great Gussage, Dorset.’
‘We shall have to charge you, Mr Luckles,’ (he pronounced it Luckless) ‘with giving false information to the police. I should advise you to answer the ensuing enquiries accurately. Are your insurance certificate, driving licence and motor licence in order?’
‘What’s the good of my telling you? You know damn well they’re not.’
‘Anything known?’ said one policeman to the other.
‘Quite a lot,’ said the other, and addressed Peter. ‘You will be charged with riding dangerously, riding under the influence, riding an unlicensed machine, without an operative driving licence, and causing the death of a man. You will now accompany us in the ambulance to the Amesbury police station, where you will be formally charged with these offences, and will enter a hospital for the necessary treatment. But first we should like your account of the incident.’
‘Well, I was on my way to Stonehenge …’
‘After dinner, no doubt?’
‘Naturally after dinner. Hours after. I dined with friends at Little Gussage.’
‘And had plenty to drink there, I take it.’
‘Well, they did me all right. I wasn’t drunk, if that’s what you’re getting at. I was quite capable of riding the Vespa.’
‘It appears not, doesn’t it. And you’re slurring your words now. What made you take that bend on the off side?’
‘How should I know? I didn’t know there was anything in the way. The next thing I knew, I’d crashed, and was lying in the road all tangled up with a push bike. Of course I’m damned sorry about him, whose-ever fault it was. But he hadn’t got his lights on, and no one could’ve seen him, poor chap.’
‘Well,’ said the policemen, putting away their notebooks and looking impassive, ‘that will be all for now.’
Peter’s three friends said they would accompany the ambulance to the police station, for they did not like to desert him in his dark hour. They were allowed to do this, and when Peter had been charged and taken to the hospital for treatment, they drove on to Stonehenge and joined the great crowd who were milling round the stones in the dark. Some sat on the grass drinking beer and tea and playing gramophone records, some on the tops of the stones obstructing the view so that no one behind them would see the Druids when they arrived. The fence round the circle of stones was well broken by those who had surged through it. Among these was the party whom Peter and his three friends had arranged to join. When they heard of poor Peter’s latest mischance, they all agreed that it could scarcely look worse for poor Peter. Riding with suspended driving licence his unlicensed, uninsured Vespa, quite drunk, taking a blind corner on the off side and killing a cyclist—it might well be manslaughter and prolonged incarceration. As they were all fond of poor Peter, they were shocked and saddened and drank some more. It was about half past three and quite dark still. The Druids would not be there until after four. People were eating and drinking out of paper bags and beer bottles, and throwing the empty bottles at the stones. Gramophones played jigging music, and there was rocking and rolling. But Peter’s friends sat on the grass against one of the sarsen stones, and sadly drank. They were Bill Hammond, and the two Bun-Flanagans, and Henry and Emily, whom they had joined. Henry and Emily were engaged, and had driven over from the house of Henry’s parents at Tarrant Hinton. Henry was a lawyer and a novelist; he was very distinguished-looking but by now quite drunk. Emily was pale, round-faced and wide-eyed, and she too was now intoxicated. Both had reached the quietly morose stage, and were taking an irritable view of the proceedings. When the dawn began, it was chilly and grey, and the stones looked still more rude and unpleasing than in the dark.
The Druids were perceived to be arriving, and there was a general rush towards them. White-robed and hooded, some oak-garlanded, they did not suggest the Ku Klux Klan, nor even, really, such Druids as Caesar and Tacitus and Nennius had known, spell-hurlers, potent magicians and enchanters, wielders of the sacrificial knife, bards and priests of the sacred groves, bloody and learned men; no, these Druids seemed innocent, mild, affected, performing their innocuous rites with prim correctness, feeding the sacred fire with sacred oak boughs from the sacred groves, uttering mystic words, joining hands and beseeching the sun to arise, but in vain, it did not arise. The Druids did not seem to mind; they were no doubt used to this, and had probably never seen it arise, which, for heliolaters, made a frustrated life. But they went on about the Sacred Purpose and the Divine Harmony and the Three Desirable Objectives which all Druids ever strive to uphold; they seemed to invoke the Great Spirit, and rather suggested Red Indians or the Ethical Society; in fact, they were pretty sissy. There seemed to be some implication that earlier Druids had planned and built Stonehenge, a notion in which they had been encouraged in the past but now not at all, for they had been long told that Stonehenge was built a millennium and a half before any Druids entered Britain, but they did not listen much to this, and did not care for archaeologists. So they innocently pomped it among the great stones as if these were their temple, reciting their spells the while, and obviously intent on the good and noble life, in spite of being so phoney.
‘Where are the wicker images?’ a hopeful child enquired of her parents.
‘What wicker images, silly?’
‘The ones the Druids had, to burn people in.’ For it was this holocaust that she had been allowed, she thought, to come and see, so delightfully, in the very middle of the night.
‘Oh, they don’t burn people now, they’ve learnt better. Besides, the police are here.’
‘Won’t there be human sacrifices, like the book we do at school says?’
‘No pet, not to-night.’
‘Why are they lighting a fire on that stone?’
‘That’s Druid magic, that is. Look, that’s Mr Popplethwaite from the draper’s in the High Street lighting it.’
‘Will they sacrifice an animal?’
‘Dear me no, Mr Popplethwaite wouldn’t consider doing a thing like that.’
‘Well, will they chase early Christians, like in the pictures?’
‘No early Christians here.’
‘Why aren’t there?’
‘Afraid of the Druids, I shouldn’t wonder.’
Hope dwindled. The expedition was apparently for nothing in particular, only to see the big stones by night and Mr Popplethwaite playing games with fire and water. The child, raised on her father’s shoulders, yawned, drifting into sleep. The Druids went on with their strange rites, speaking the while of the Golden Age, the Triad, and the Word that had been made known to their forebears. They were prolix and high-minded, but few people could hear what they said.
The friends of Peter Luckles did not try to; they thought poorly of the whole business, sitting against a sarsen stone on the grass and drinking. Three of them had brought with them Druid costumes, which they had thought would be amusing to put on, but the idea no longer seemed good. The outsize stones looked as uncultured as ever, in spite of all the work lately done on them. Those who wrote them up said they were polished, but this did not seem to be noticeably the case.
‘The wrong shapes, the wrong sizes, no elegance, no architectural unity. What, after all, do they mean?’ they complained.
‘Religion, human sacrifice, bloody death. Like all ancient temples,’ Henry grumbled.
Emily, who viewed religion, human sacrifice and bloody death with the greatest apprehension, and only liked ancient temples for their elegant and noble shapes and their sculptured ornament, blenched at Stonehenge. Why had the Bronze Age inhabitants of Britain been so little accomplished that, at a time when their contemporaries overseas were building Mycenae, Tiryns, Knossos, and all that, all they could manage was to transport great slabs of rock from one part of Britain to another, cut
and polish them inadequately, and stand them on end in circles? So much labour, such huge, uncultured achievement, like the uncouth gestures of giants.
‘Bloody cannibals,’ Henry said, as if the builders of Stonehenge had been capitalists and he a Soviet orator.
‘My uncle Danny is a cannibal,’ said Sukey. ‘He sells things to cannibal chiefs in Africa and goes to their banquets, and they often have human dishes. Uncle Danny rather likes them, they keep up his strength. He says if ever he lives in Europe again, he’ll have to contrive something, or he’ll waste away.’
The rain began; it had a persevering look, tumbling out of slate-grey skies. There was a rush towards the car park across the road. Henry stopped his quiet drinking and said, ‘We’d better get back. I’m leaving my car in Amesbury for the night, the steering wants seeing to. Can you take Emily and me to Tarrant?’
‘Very wise of you, Henry,’ said Bill. ‘Meet us outside the George.’
The others all got in, Bill and Emily and Sukey and Tim, and, when they had fought their way out of the car park, they drove off into the wet dawn, and presently Henry joined them outside the George.
Two miles out of Amesbury Sukey said, ‘That’s the bend where Peter met the bicycle.’
‘Stop,’ Tim said. ‘I want to look for my lighter.’
He got out, and Henry got out too, and they searched the road and the green verge.
‘All right,’ Tim said presently, ‘here it is.’
Henry went on looking about.
‘Peter may have dropped something,’ he said, moving his torch about the edge of the road. But nothing was there, only the rain-splashed dust and the green wet verge and a frog that hopped in the ditch. The smell of honeysuckle and dog-roses and cow-parsley and rank ditch mud hung on the air above the crushed and flattened grass where Peter and his Vespa and the cyclist and his Rover had lain tangled and smashed, and the others had sat by them plying them with Thermoses and flasks and vain comfort, and the police with their questions and notebooks had, experienced and grave like recording angels, summed up the scene.
If any of them had left anything there, it was no longer there now. Henry got into the car; they drove on through the melancholy night and the soft midsummer rain.
‘What’s the worst they can do to poor Peter?’ Sukey asked of Henry, who as a lawyer might know, though under-briefed and meaning to stand soon for Parliament as a Socialist, or perhaps a Tory.
‘Oh, he won’t get much,’ Henry said. ‘Perhaps six months, for all those crimes—no driving or car licence or insurance, dangerous driving while suspended and drunk, misinforming the police, and all his past driving record. The fact that the poor chap died doesn’t add much actually.’
He did not pronounce ‘actually’ at all well, and the others thought how wise he had been to leave his car in Amesbury.
Bill said, ‘But surely the fatal crime was to kill a man. It could be manslaughter, I suppose.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Henry, indistinctly. ‘That’s finished.’
‘Still,’ said Bill, ‘I should have thought it could be two years, given a vicious judge.’
Henry, wrapped in thought and drink, did not answer.
Sukey said, ‘Poor old Peter. He must have had a hellish time, lying there for an hour by himself with the dead chap.’
‘An hour?’ said Henry.
‘Well, the doctor said he must have died at least an hour ago.’
‘I wouldn’t give that,’ said Henry, ‘for what doctors say about times of death. Did Peter say he’d been there an hour?’
‘I shouldn’t think Peter had a clue,’ said Tim, ‘the way he was.’
Henry and Emily were dropped presently at Tarrant Hinton, where they were staying with Henry’s parents. The midsummer night had not agreed with Emily, who was pale and shivering now that her mild intoxication had abated. She looked wan and plain, and had no word or smile for her friends as they parted. She and Henry had fallen out and were estranged; perhaps, thought Emily, for good.
Henry said to her ‘I shall be going to Amesbury early for the car,’ and Emily replied, ‘I shall catch the 11.15 from Salisbury,’ then went up to bed.
One cannot sleep in the midsummer dawn, the day coming inexorably on. Emily lay awake and restless and heard the noisy birds, slept awhile, and woke a little before eight. Henry’s amiable mother had put a portable wireless in her room; she turned it on, and it spoke about the weather, of how a weak cold front was advancing from the east, and would reach the western counties before evening, and how there would be scattered showers and bright intervals. Then it said, changing the subject, ‘Here is a police message. An accident occurred on the A 345 road two miles from Amesbury last night, between a motor cyclist and a pedal cyclist. The pedal cyclist was killed. Anyone who saw the accident or can give any information about it is asked to communicate with the Chief Constable, Salisbury 1212.’
Emily turned it off. She dressed and packed and went down to breakfast, where Henry’s parents were eating away, but Henry had gone to Amesbury in the bus. Emily said she had to catch the 11.15 from Salisbury.
‘Why not wait for Henry to drive you up this afternoon?’ said Henry’s mother.
Emily said she had a luncheon engagement. Henry’s mother said to herself, and later to Henry’s father, ‘They’ve fallen out. Henry was as cross as a bear this morning.’
‘Oh I shouldn’t think they had,’ said Henry’s father, who was reading The Times.
‘I wonder what it was about,’ said Henry’s mother.
‘Well, if they have they’ll soon make it up,’ said Henry’s father, ‘so it won’t matter what it was about.’ And he went on with The Times, while Henry’s mother rather wished her sister Peggy was staying with them.
The coroner’s jury at the inquest on the cyclist decided that he had been killed in a collision with the motor cycle of Peter Luckles somewhere between one and one-thirty on the night of June 20. They added a severe corollary about dangerous and intoxicated driving. Mr Luckles was committed for trial at the next Assizes, allowed bail, and taken to his parents’ home to mend his broken ankle and consider his plight. A plight indeed it was. At first his father was almost too vexed with him to do anything about engaging counsel for his defence, for he felt that a spell in prison would be just what Peter needed and deserved. But his wife prevailed on him to get their son defended, though Peter himself was too depressed to care much; he felt that he was certainly doomed, and rightly so, for he had killed a man. His friends tried to cheer him up in vain. They suggested that Henry Tarrant might be engaged in his defence. But Henry, though known to be brilliant, was also known to be drinking pretty heavily just now, and his defence of a drunken driver would make an unfavourable impression on the court, so Henry was ruled out. They got a sober, sensible barrister, who would do his best for this probably hopeless case. He asked Peter to tell him all he knew about the accident, but found that Peter did not know much. He had started from the house of his friends at Gussage All Saints at, he supposed, about half past one.
‘Surely before that,’ said the lawyer. ‘According to medical evidence the cyclist had been dead for at least an hour when the doctor examined him at 2.30. The distance from Gussage All Saints is about twenty-three miles.’
‘Well, it may have been at one, I dare say. Does it matter?’
‘It might. Because, even if you started at one, you would have done the twenty-three miles in about twenty-five minutes, which is an incautious pace on a dark night along an unlit road for someone in the condition you were. It would add to the impression of reckless riding, which it’s our job to lessen. I should certainly not tell the court that.’
‘But the Vespa always does a pretty good lick. It has a good headlight.’
‘I know. They dazzle everyone else on the road. Do you know the number of people—drivers, walkers and cyclists—who are killed by dazzling headlights each year? Of course they shouldn’t be allowed. If they weren’t, driver
s would have to go slow and there’d be a damned sight fewer accidents. But anything for speed, these days.’ Disgust with headlights and with speed tightened the lawyer’s face. ‘So for heaven’s sake don’t go saying things about headlights and good licks. Good headlights are feared and hated; you’d get more sympathy if you’d only had sidelights on. All the members of the jury who have been dazed and dazzled and endangered by headlamps are liable to see red at the thought of them. I am myself. And judges see redder than anyone. I’m afraid you may get old Arbuthnot.’
‘Afraid?’
‘Yes. His wife was crippled for life by a crash. He was driving, and the other car didn’t dip its lights. He’s never got over it. So the less we say about speed and headlamps the better. You must surely have left Gussage some time before one.’
‘I told you, I don’t remember. My friends might.’
‘I shan’t ask them. If they confirm your time, it would be bad, and one can’t ask them to lie.’
‘Oh, they wouldn’t mind. I’d do it for them.’
‘I dare say. But I think we’ll leave them out of it, and not stress the time. You’ve more than enough counts against you without that. Unfortunately this man Jim Higgins was known as a very experienced cyclist. He seems to have been a nice chap, riding from Cranborne to meet his wife and children at Amesbury and take them to Stonehenge to see the Druids.’
Peter groaned. ‘Those damned bloody Druids. They still cause as many deaths as they used to five thousand years ago.’
‘Well, come, hardly five,’ said the lawyer, who was rather a pedant.
‘Oh, what’s it matter. The point is they’ve killed Jim Higgins, and they’ll get me put in jug. All that ballyhoo in the middle of the night. I should never have gone near them; I might have known.’
The lawyer reflected that there were so many things that Peter might have known that they had better be getting on with them. He turned the conversation on to some of them. The case for the defence looked such stuff as dreams are made of.
CHAPTER II
Letters to a Sister Page 24
