Change Here For Babylon

by Nina Bawden

  He sighed, stared at me for a moment, and then got to his feet. He returned to his earlier, uncertain manner. He looked gauche and shy, and out of place.

  “I’m sorry to have troubled you again,” he said. Then, hesitantly: “This car. The one that knocked you down. You are quite sure you can’t help us there?”

  I shook my head. “It was a shock, you see. The car was being driven very fast and it was dark.”

  “Unfortunate.” He sounded thoughtful. “No one in that area had a visitor last night who came by car. We would very much like to know who was driving it and where it was going. I expect you know, sir, the lane is a dead end.”

  I said: “Perhaps someone took the wrong road?”

  His face brightened as if I had said something original and helpful. “That’s quite possible. But if that were so it’s difficult to see why the car didn’t stop when it hit you, or, indeed, why it was going so fast that it couldn’t brake, in time. If the driver had been unsure of the road, wouldn’t he have been going more slowly?”

  He looked at me with an air of reserve and I was conscious of the small, hard core of authority beneath the diffident politeness.

  He said: “Perhaps Mr. Parry had a visitor last night after all. Try and remember about the car, Mr. Harrington. It might help both of us.”

  The words were too gently spoken to be a threat. He smiled as he said good-bye, and shook my hand.

  Mrs. Parry said: “She’s gone out to lunch with Mr. Hunter.”

  Her movements, as she laid the table, were heavy and tired; the skin was flaccid round her jaw bone. She seemed, in the course of a night, to have acquired the pathos and defencelessness of age. The flesh, had loosened on her face and the big nose stood out like a bridge, her pale eyes sunken on either side of it.

  Geoffrey had telephoned at noon and called for Nora half an hour later. She had been excited and pleased; she had worn her new suit and her best hat.

  Mrs. Parry said sourly: “What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”

  I said: “What the hell do you mean?” And she looked at me with an air of obscene triumph and said: “Well, you don’t think you’re the only one who can play this sort of game, do you? Do you expect them not to try to get a bit of their own back?”

  I said: “There is nothing so thoroughly nasty as the mind of a good woman.”

  It went over her head; she went on, with the same kind of revengeful pleasure.

  “You’ll make a nice mess for yourselves, the four of you. But you’ll have to pay for it in the end, mark my words. And it won’t be pleasant. Wicked and selfish—that’s what you all are. Greedy—never a decent thought for others. My son is dead and my only daughter doesn’t think of me and what I may be suffering. Oh, no. She’s off out with the first man who asks her. Sex—that’s the only thing you ever think of. Just like a lot of nasty animals. …”

  There was a lot more and it was all revolting. It was like lifting the lid of a long-buried coffin and it made me sick with horror. I stayed as long as I could because she was an unhappy woman and she was old and tired, but in the end I couldn’t stand it any longer. I left the table and my unfinished lunch and went out of the house, half-running down the road. Running away from the sparkle of venonz in her pale eyes and her unclean tongue. I remember that I looked continuously over my shoulder as if I were afraid she would follow me.

  My heart was pounding when I reached the river, and not from physical exertion. I sat by the brown water, on a pile of crackling leaves, and smoked one cigarette after another. I felt dirty, as if I had been touched by something far worse than ordinary human wickedness and failure.

  Then the feeling of contamination went and I felt, as always, that I had behaved badly. I should have stayed and let her work it out of her system; it was cowardly and cruel to leave her. She had looked ill, she had genuine cause for grievance and I should have tried to help her. Then even that seemed presumptuous and I was back again in the familiar circle of guilt and self-recrimination. I wondered whether everyone felt like this and so continuously.

  Geoffrey, I thought, was not the kind. Doubt never troubled him, nor any sense of failure. He was armoured with success.

  I felt hatred crawl in my stomach until my limbs were trembling and I was sick with it. It was something I had come to live with. Until the last few days it had walked beside me obscurely, like a shadow; now it had acquired form and substance and could no longer be ignored.

  Nora said: “Geoffrey says I would be silly to divorce you.”

  She had arrived in my rooms in college in the middle of the afternoon. She was pink and giggly and still a little tipsy from lunch; the make-up had gone greasy on her face and her eyes were hard and shiny with drink. She was wearing very high-heeled shoes and an unsuitably fussy hat. Her manner was a mixture of shyness and excitement; she kicked off her shoes as if they hurt her and curled up in the armchair; talking in a machine-gun fashion like a child who has been taken for an unexpected treat. She told me where she had been and what she had to eat, how kind Geoffrey had been to her and how understanding. It had been a successful lunch; he had found, for Nora, the right kind of flattery. He had told her that she had a good, clear, trained mind and should be doing something more important than looking after a home and a husband. She repeated this, staring at me with bright defiance. Then she said, with an air almost of archness, her little piece about divorce.

  I knew that it was her only weapon and that she was using it as such; nevertheless, the words, once spoken in her light clipped voice, were irretrievable. In the startled silence that followed them she seemed to crumple, the ebullient mood left her and she picked nervously at the stuff of her skirt.

  I said: “Were you thinking of doing so?”

  She gave me a tight, artificial smile. “No. Not really,” she said. Her voice was frightened and uncertain as if she had said something she had not meant to say. She went on, unhappily: “Of course I’d thought of it. What did you expect? And I told Geoffrey so.” She said his Christian name a little coyly. “But it was only an impulse. I think—and he agrees with me—that it would be foolish. After all, Emily is a wildly emotional sort of person—almost adolescent in a way. She’s not educated, or even particularly intelligent and these things do count, don’t they? I mean, you haven’t had to live with her. I dare say this sort of love affair is exciting and I expect she’s good in bed, but it isn’t the whole of life, is it? After all, being married to someone and living with them all the time is a different thing from just being in love with them. The everyday things are more important. I expect you do think you are in love with her—but this kind of love is the sort of thing you read about in penny magazines. It doesn’t happen in real life, not among grown people.”

  If the echo of Geoffrey’s voice hadn’t been so clear, it might have been funny. As it was, she sounded like a child repeating, without understanding, the words of an adult, and it saddened me.

  I said: “Nora, do you really think like that?”

  She flushed with annoyance and bit her lip. Then she said, angrily: “Of course I do. If you had really loved her, you would have taken her away when she asked you to.”

  I said: “I suppose Geoffrey told you that?”

  It was useless to say to her that it wasn’t so simple; it was no good trying to explain at all.

  She began to cry in a slow, hiccuping sort of way. “Oh, Tom,” she said, “don’t you see what a dreadful thing you have done to me? Why did you do it? You must have hated me so much.”

  I wondered if she would always see what had happened as a deep, personal affront.

  I said: “Dear, I don’t hate you. You must know that. It isn’t like that at all.”

  She didn’t take any notice. She went on crying in a persistent, drunken fashion until she began to yawn a little, rubbing her hot eyes with the back of her hand and tipping the silly hat sideways on her head.

  She said: “Tom, I’m so tired. Can I go to sleep here
?”

  I thought of Mrs. Parry, alone in the empty house.

  I said: “Hadn’t you better go home to your mother?”

  It seemed, suddenly, that between us we were forgetting the thing that had overshadowed our private unhappiness; I looked at Nora and felt ashamed and petty. But she stared blankly at me as if she didn’t understand what I was saying, and I knew that, to her, David’s death had become relatively unimportant.

  I said: “I’ll get a taxi and take you home. You can sleep there.”

  She gave me a sleepy grateful smile. I rang through to the lodge and asked them to get me a taxi. I gave her a towel and told her to go and wash her face. She came back from the bathroom with the make-up washed off her face and her hat in her hand. She had combed her hair loosely round her face and she looked tired and young.

  When we got home, the house was empty; Mrs. Parry had left a note saying she had gone out to do the shopping. I took Nora upstairs to bed. She stood quite still while I undressed her and turned back the covers. I tidied up her clothes and hung her suit up in the wardrobe. She watched me from the bed. When I had finished she stretched out an arm; I went and sat on the bed beside her and held her hand.

  I said: “Go to sleep now. You’ll feel much better after an hour or two. It’s silly to drink too much at lunchtime.”

  Her forehead creased as if she were trying to remember something. Then she said:

  “Tom, you didn’t tell me that you were out with Emily on the night that David was killed.”

  She said it quite naturally as if it were not at all important, merely something that I had omitted to tell her. It was an effort to remember that she knew nothing at all about the way that David had died.

  I said carefully: “Who told you?”

  She yawned and snuggled down under the covers.

  “Geoffrey said so. He said you were silly not to tell the police yourself because they were bound to find out.” She looked at me slyly, through half-closed eyes. “Tom, where did you go, you and Emily? When you were together, I mean?”

  It seemed somehow indecent that she should ask me that. I remember that I was not only embarrassed but quite extraordinarily shocked by her prurient curiosity.

  I said: “We weren’t together all that much. Don’t torment yourself about it. What else did Geoffrey tell you?”

  She said sleepily: “Oh, nothing much. Just that Emily had gone to pick you up from the Fosters’and knocked you off your bicycle. He said you hadn’t told the police about it—although I don’t know why that matters—and that it was awkward, because someone saw the car down the lane and they had been making inquiries at the garage. Is it important, Tom? I’m so dreadfully tired.”

  “No,” I said. “It isn’t important. Try and sleep.”

  I stayed with her until she was breathing heavily; when she was finally asleep her mouth opened a little and the grip of her hot hand relaxed.

  Then I went downstairs and rang Geoffrey. There was no answer. I rang at regular intervals throughout the evening and there was still no reply.

  Chapter Nine

  Emily had been making apple jam. I sat on the kitchen table and watched her as she covered the jars with circles of white waxed paper, and tied them round with string. She wrote the month and the year on small labels and stuck them on the sides of the jars. She was deft and methodical where Nora would have been clumsy; her hands, which were big and strong-fingered for a woman, were quick and competent.

  She said: “I don’t know why he told them. There was no need. …”

  Her eyes were unhappy and darkly circled; the whites were unclear and her skin looked muddy. Her shoulders sagged a little as though from a weight of tiredness. When she had finished sticking on the labels, she took the jars, two at a time, one in each hand and stacked them in rows in the store cupboard.

  She straightened her back wearily and pushed the soft hair away from, her forehead with a gesture that she had borrowed from Geoffrey.

  She said: “He thought that it seemed simpler to tell them a little of the truth. They were already curious—it was better to appear to be open with them.”

  The police had been waiting for Geoffrey when he came home after his lunch with Nora. He had been shut in his study with Walker for more than an hour. Emily had waited in the hall, wondering and fearful, unable to hear what they were saying and unwilling to move, ready to hide in the kitchen if the door should open.

  I knew how Geoffrey would look to Walker as if I had been in the room with him. He would have made an excellent impression, sitting at ease in his leather chair, his light eyes wide and honest. He would have appeared to Walker as he would have appeared to anyone: a decent chap making a clean breast of a difficult and distasteful story. And it would have fitted in better with the picture he was presenting to say that his wife and her lover had lied for the old and obvious reason than to have no story to tell at all.

  I said: “Maybe he’s right. Maybe it is easier this way. If the wolves are coming, you chuck out the weakest and keep them occupied for a while.”

  She said uncertainly: “Geoffrey thinks it will be all right. He said it might protect us all.”

  I said: “That’s kind of him. So the story runs that you came to meet me at the Fosters’. That you had arranged to meet me there and that, inadvertently, you ran me down. Naturally we lied, you and I, because we didn’t want anyone to know about our little affaire. But Geoffrey already knew, didn’t he? And the police know that he knew. How did he explain that away?”

  Her voice was spent. “We might have said that we wouldn’t meet again. It would be enough if only I had promised not to see you. Then it would still be reasonable to lie, wouldn’t it?”

  I said: “Would we have lied in a thing like this? When David was dead, and our movements had to be accounted for?”

  She put her hand to her mouth and stared at me with eyes, that were blue and fearful.

  She said: “But, Tom, if we knew nothing about that—if we were innocent and had nothing to be afraid of, surely, then, it wouldn’t matter to us what the police thought? It would only matter that Geoffrey and Nora shouldn’t know we had been together.”

  I said: “I suppose so. But what about the other car? If they’ve been to the garage, they must know that Geoffrey took it out that night.”

  Everything seemed to be very far away but clear, like distant mountains seen on a bright, still day.

  She said softly: “He had some letters—important letters—to take to the general post office in the town. The last collection had already gone from the village. That was what he said to the man at the garage when he went to fetch the car. There is no reason why they should not believe him now.”

  I said: “He thinks ahead, doesn’t he? But why the hell did he have to tell them about you and me? Was he scared?”

  She smiled as she might have smiled at a child’s absurdity. “Oh, no. He wasn’t scared. He never is. He is so sure.”

  I said: “I don’t get it. If he was so sure and so safe on his pinnacle, and not at all afraid, then why give so much of the game away?”

  Her mouth quivered a little. “Just because he is sure. He knows that he is in command and that nothing can ever touch him. It makes him overreach himself, always.”

  She stopped and looked self-conscious as if she had said more than she had meant to say. I asked her what she was talking about, but she shook her head and, her eyes had a frightened, abstracted look as if she knew that what she had said was true, but did not know why. She was good at emotional, intuitive judgments although I had always thought her blind about Geoffrey. Now, suddenly, I wondered whether it might not have been a protective measure for herself.

  I asked her where I could find Geoffrey and she said he was in the workshop cleaning his guns.

  “I hope Nora found him a comfort yesterday,” she said. She gave me a shadow of a smile. “I found her ear-rings in the car. They had slipped down between the two front seats.”

 
We both laughed a little and then I kissed her. She was soft and warm and her breath smelt of jam. In my arms she relaxed a little, her eyes big and shining as if she were near to tears.

  I said: “Emily, why haven’t you left him before?”

  It was the first time I had ever asked her that. I think I had been too afraid that she loved him. I know that I had always thought he was necessary to her.

  She frowned a little and said, surprisingly: “Because he thinks so clearly.” Her voice was uncertain as if she were out of her depth. If I had asked Nora a similar question in like circumstances she would have answered immediately and it would have sounded plausible. Emily was too honest to be glib; now, she pulled herself away from me and her eyes were afraid and her mouth small and taut.

  “I can’t really explain. It’s something to do with his always being so right and making other people seem so muddled. He is clever, you know, and living with him you get so that it’s easier to accept what he says is true than work it out for yourself. He doesn’t want me to leave him, and if I had done so for my own reasons I should have felt terribly in the wrong. I’ve often felt that something was right and not been able to explain why; with Geoffrey, the explanation is always more important than the feeling so he is able to twist you round to his way of thinking and you believe he must be right.”

  She looked at me in a shy and puzzled way.

  She said: “Tom, you’re the only person I’ve ever met who’s more muddled than I am, and yet it doesn’t seem to matter with you. You’re half-conventional, half-religious, if you like, and in a funny sort of way you’re more right than Geoffrey who’s never been half-anything in his life.”

  Her face was hot with the effort to explain. She caught hold of my arms and shook me gently. I think I did understand, dimly, what she was trying to say, but just then I was more grateful for her belief in me and her obvious love than for her stumbling judgment. I kissed her again and held her tightly. And then I went to look for Geoffrey.