‘When can we meet?’
‘Not today,’ I said. ‘At least I don’t think so. Can you understand what I mean when I say I don’t want to meet? Yet. You know that things were not always easy between Harriet and me. And you know how I feel about you. But this is the last way I would ever have sought a solution.…’
‘Well, of course, of course, but—’
‘So I’m struggling to get my bearings and at the same time struggling with the shock. What I do feel is that I’ve got to take this on my own chin and not expect outside help.’
‘I see what you mean. But would mine be outside help?’
‘Let me put it another way, darling. First there was Harriet—with comradeship and identity of interest. Then there was you—with so very much more. Ever since May you and she have existed separately, never met till Thursday night, never overlapped. Now—now, because of this frightful accident, you never need to. Telling her, the divorce—there’s no need for any of it. I’m so glad now that I didn’t tell her—didn’t have to. But … I have to take her home. I’ll do that. I want to do it. I want to end a chapter of my life, as decently as possible. When it’s ended I want to begin a new one. Do you understand how I feel?’
‘Ye-es. Yes, I think so. But does that mean that we don’t see each other at all?’
‘Only for a while. Only for a little while. Even if I didn’t feel this way, it would—it would be …’
‘More seemly?’ she said.
‘Oh, God, I don’t mean it in any old-fashioned sense.… Or maybe I do. You and I were in love. It happened. Now it can happen quite differently. Well, I’m glad of that. It will be the one golden thing to come out of this mess. In a week or two—or a month or two—let’s begin again.’
The one golden thing. It was useful to be a playwright, a writer; the right words, the corny words, came even when you didn’t feel them, even when you felt at this moment that nothing good at all could come out of this mess, because good cannot come out of evil any more than the sun can shine at night.
Question, does one believe in such things as good and evil any more?
Anyway, the one important thing was that I should not see her until I had a better control of my feelings, because you may lie successfully over the telephone but not facing a person who loves you. My pose of restrained grief wouldn’t wear for five minutes: she’d know it was false in some way, though she wouldn’t know exactly how.
On the way back to the hotel I was wiser this time and told the taxi driver to stop at the bookstall on the corner. Then I slid round to the side door and was in the staff lift before anyone could see me. I felt a little better for being out.
When I got to my suite a number of things had been thrust under the door, including a telegram from Ralph saying he was coming over tomorrow. I walked into the salon reading this and at first did not notice the man standing by a chair from which he had just risen.
I said jerkily: ‘Who the devil are you? How did you get in here?’
‘My name is Lamartine, monsieur. M. le Proconsul sent me. I called twice yesterday but could get no answer and the desk told me you had lifted the phone off. I am the director of Lamartine et fils, entrepreneurs des pompes funèbres.’
He was a short, square-built man with trousers half an inch too long and a formal manner.
‘An autopsy? So … I did not know that. But of course it is not unusual where the deceased has not been under medical attention. All this will take a little time.’ M. Lamartine coughed behind his hand. ‘As to arrangements, monsieur, is it true you have decided to send the deceased back to England? It will of course be much more expensive. Perhaps more than thirty-five hundred francs.’
‘Where will they have taken her?’
‘Taken her? Oh, for the autopsy. To the Institut Medico-Légal. That is in the Quai de la Rapée, near the Gare de Lyon. I must tell you that there are formalities in the transfer of mortal remains from one country to another.’
‘What information do you want from me now?’ I asked impatiently.
‘If you will fill up this form, sir, giving us authority as soon as we are able to proceed.’
I took the form from him. Half of it was already completed.
‘We are well used to dealing with British subjects, monsieur. Everything, you may be sure, will be done in the best of taste. My father, who has been dead now some years, cared for over thirty thousand British soldiers after the First World War. Many he disinterred from unsuitable resting places and laid to rest with full honours in one of the war cemeteries. For this he was made a Member of the British Empire.’
‘My congratulations.’
‘Thank you, monsieur.’ M. Lamartine took out a large silk handkerchief and wiped his mouth. ‘As to the coffin, now, I see that the deceased was five feet eight inches tall. We have a very good coffin made of—’
‘Give me the best. I don’t want details.’
‘Very well, as you say … Unfortunately an additional expense is that the casket must be lead lined—’
‘Lead lined?’
‘It is one of the regulations for the transport of remains from one country to another. After the autopsy, when the body has been released, it must be sealed in lead in the presence of officials—the Secretaire Général of the Mairie, an Officier de Police Judiciaire and myself.’
‘But for God’s sake why? She’s not radio-active.’
M. Lamartine permitted himself a grey smile. ‘We have to sign a certificate that the coffin contains only the funeral remains. It is a regulation. You will appreciate that criminals will use all resorts to cheat the law, so the law has to devise what may seem clumsy means to prevent them.’
I had filled out the rest of the form. ‘After the body has been—released, as you call it, will there be any further delay then?’
‘None at all, monsieur, I assure you. The coffin will be flown over the following night. We have agents in England who will collect it at London Airport, and make all final arrangements for the funeral in England.’
I handed back the form.
‘Leave everything to us, M. Scott. This is my card with our address.’
I did not go out again that day, nor all the next. I had my meals sent up. I heard nothing from the police and only had one call from Mr. Knight at the Legation checking that things were proceeding normally and that I did not need his further help. Foreign money, which no doubt was a difficulty with most people, was no problem for me. On the Wednesday I watched men beginning the repair of the broken glass roof; it was strangely significant, like sweeping up the final debris after an accident; once that was gone there was nothing left.
In the afternoon Ralph Diary arrived. He was quite tearful; he had always been attached to Harriet, and perhaps the Jewish strain in his nature made him emotional. While we talked in the hotel suite we looked through the letters which had already come. He had brought newspapers to show me; the English had copied the French. That week there had been a crisis in the Far East, an air disaster in Marseilles and a scandal over a pop singer, so that ‘Playwright’s Wife Killed,’ ‘First Night Tragedy,’ ‘ Wife of Morris Scott Falls from Balcony’ did not make the biggest headlines. There was little to follow up, and it seemed unlikely that I should be too much troubled by reporters when I got home.
Home. It was a curious word now. Ralph suggested I should go and spend the first week in England with him. I refused.
Perhaps you don’t ever really try to know yourself until something like this happens; you see a two-dimensional face in the glass, you get to know it better than all others, you are concerned about the pimple that forms at the edge of the eyebrow, there’s tartar on the bottom teeth, you’re looking a bit sallow this morning because of too many late nights. But you don’t ever really know or attempt to discover any blemish forming on the mind, or spiritual tartar which will lead to decay, or sallowness and sourness of the reasoning brain. You wait till the thing happens and then you peer again into the unreveallng
glass and ask yourself why.
Or you do if you’re not entirely lost in the depths of a criminal psychosis.
Ralph left again on Thursday afternoon. I had not telephoned Alexandra again but I wrote her a brief letter saying that the press were still troublesome and it was better from every point of view that we should not meet.
I heard nothing further from the police, until Thursday evening about nine when they telephoned asking me to come to the Commissariat again. I took a taxi right away and was shown into the same room as before. Commissaire Adjoint Millot was there but no one else.
‘Forgive me for troubling you rather late in the evening, Mr. Scott. I would have left it until the morning but I thought you would want to get this settled up as quickly as possible. I haven’t bothered to ring the Consulate because they are closed at this time, and I assume you have objection to our having a little private chat.’
‘None at all.’
‘Good. Good.’ M. Millot rubbed the furrow in his cheek. ‘We have now had a full analyst’s report, and of course it is negative as we expected. There is just one rather delicate matter that has arisen. I wonder if you could help us.’
‘If I can.’
‘According to witnesses, M. Scott, witnesses that is, of your return to the hotel last Thursday night, your wife was a little—under the influence—is that how it is expressed? I know in your procès you said she was not, but others have testified differently. Without wishing to press you to alter your original statement, I should like your comment on this testimony.’
I looked down at my hands, these hands that had pushed her, frowned at them. ‘My wife, M. Millot, had drunk a little. She might have been a trifle unsteady; certainly no more. It is exaggerating to make more of it than that.’
‘That is how we feel, monsieur.’
I looked up and met the cool brown eyes. ‘ What do you mean?’
‘The amount of alcohol found in the body was remarkably little. It could hardly be enough to have caused the slightest unsteadiness. That is the puzzle—to reconcile this and the testimony of three witnesses.’
‘It’s exactly what I meant when I said in the first place that she was not drunk. She had taken all evening perhaps three glasses of champagne.’
Millot looked at the paper on his desk. ‘That would be about correct.’
‘I think, M. l’Adjoint, I have to try to explain to you. My wife was a very highly strung woman, a woman of the highest intelligence and sobriety. An evening such as that night—the excitement, the play, the success—those of themselves were like alcohol to her, went to her head. It made her difficult to handle, headstrong, carried away. Alcohol—that was only an addition. It was just enough to send her over—one glass, two glasses.… If she was unsteady, it was the excitement of the evening that was really to blame. Do you understand what I mean?’
‘Did she ever consult a doctor?’
‘Not for that. I pressed her to, but she refused.’
‘You, of course, monsieur, are a qualified doctor.’
‘Yes, but I practised only for a year.… I think with my wife there was some hormone imbalance which was responsible for this condition.… But you must know, M. l’Adjoint, the impossibility of relating drunkenness to the amount of alcohol taken. One man can drink whisky all night and be as cold sober as you or I. Another is unsteady after two glasses of Bordeaux. That is the difficulty with driving charges.’
‘That is the difficulty with driving charges.’ Millot inclined his head. He wrote a couple of lines on a report and then looked up. ‘You will agree, M. Scott, that although your wife had taken little alcohol, she was in appearance—and in effect—somewhat the worse for drink.’
‘If you put it that way I can hardly contradict you.’
‘No … well, thank you for coming. My compte rendu will now go to the Parquet de la Seine, where the Procurer Adjoint of the Palais de Justice will authorise the release of the body. I assume you will have made all arrangements.’
‘Yes … I have made arrangements with Lamartine et fils. I will tell them.’
‘Very good. Well, au revoir, monsieur. I am so sorry that your stay in Paris has been such a tragic one.’
So Harriet returned to England, sealed in lead, inside a pine coffin, inside a deal packing case, along with the morning newspapers and mail in an old freight plane. It would have been a good comic scene if it hadn’t been true.
I left on the Friday afternoon, and Ralph met me at the airport and drove me straight to the flat. There were more letters here and a few telegrams. Harriet had had no near relatives but two of her cousins said they would come to the funeral, which had now been fixed for Monday; two others made excuses.
Tim Dickinson, I noticed, had not written. My father wrote: ‘We were very shocked at the news of Harriet’s tragic death. This I know will be a great blow to you. It is particularly unfortunate that this should have happened in the year when you justified her faith in you; for, at my wedding, she was clearly happier than I have ever seen her before, and it seems hard that she was not able to live and share your triumph. Helen joins with me in sending love and sympathy, and she extends a cordial invitation to you—in which of course I share—to come to Winchester and spend a few weeks with us. In the surroundings of your old home it might be easier to forget.’
At the last, even though I had refused his invitation I was anxious to keep Ralph, wanting not to be left alone. The flat looked strange, smelt still of Harriet, the table tops were dusty. I asked him about Rhesus Boy and he was able to tell me that plans for its production were going ahead. No reply had yet been received from Sun International. He was a teeny bit anxious, hoping we had not overplayed our hand. If the Paris reviews had been raves it might have helped a lot. He was sending the best over. Now we must wait.
When at last he left I locked the door behind him and looked around. I wandered from one room to another picking up familiar things and setting them down. I needed some reassurance of the commonplace, to feel that objects touched and seen and used two weeks ago were the same. Not everything could have changed.
But all I got was a disturbing feeling of occupancy. Mrs. Snow had of course tidied the rooms while we were away, but this did not remove Harriet’s presence. In the bedroom her hairbrush and hand mirror were on the table beside a pile of Queens and Tatlers; there was her Victorian sewing box, a photograph of her father and mother; hairpins in a little Limoges powder bowl. I went to one of the drawers and pulled it open. It was full of pairs of stockings, each pair neatly folded in a separate cellophane bag, but so many that one had to press them down to shut the drawer. Another drawer was a mass of fancy head scarves, belts and gloves, also in cellophane bags.
It would be difficult to clear all these away, trying to the thoughts and the memory. It would take time and application. The wardrobe was full of her clothes: I had not realised what a quantity she had accumulated.
Yet it had to be done—one simply could not live in the place with her presence so pervasive. And it had to be done callously and soon.
I began to lift the frocks and coats out of the wardrobe, and, not knowing what else to do with them, carried them across to the spare room and piled them on the bed.
This was a beginning. Once they were out of my sight they could be disposed of with discretion. I had to begin to think of Harriet as dead by illness or by accident, not as deliberately killed.
The blue dress she had had before she was married; still here; fundamentally she had been thrifty, could not bear waste. I’d taken her out to dinner that first time, been disappointed she had not dressed. Not an orthodox courtship; we had talked plays all the evening: those she had acted in, those she thought ought to be written. Her attitude to the theatre I found admirably pragmatical. No theory was of value unless it ‘worked’ before an audience; no produced play was too bad to be given serious criticism and none too good to be exempt from it. She was blissfully free of the insufferable pretentiousness of the uncreativ
e. We laughed to find ourselves in agreement over and over again.
Afterwards we had walked; it was a cold night and her chin was hidden in the squirrel collar of her black coat; her breath had misted in the shop-window lights. We had walked back to her flat and she had made coffee and we had talked on into the small hours, exchanging ideas and finally confidences. She was the only child of parents who were in their late forties when she was born, her father a moderately successful barrister specialising in copyright law. When I left she had extended her hand and I had taken it and leaned forward and kissed her. The kiss might have looked singularly without passion, but it had had a certain finality about it, so that that meeting became the pattern for many—never anything explosive or emotionally unexpected about them but each building a little on the last. I didn’t even remember asking her to marry me—we both took this for granted and welcomed it as the natural and desired outcome. Perhaps there had been too little passion about it all, but it had worked, until by chance I had come up against the real thing.
Girdles, brassières, nylon petticoats, the green faille dress I had always had to zip up for her at inconvenient moments. ‘Wait a minute; don’t pinch me; I just have to hold myself in.’ Green had never really suited her; she was a little sallow for it; oddly it seemed to make her argumentative. That time in Croydon after the play; and with the waiter at the Savoy. Of course she had been in the right on both occasions; but I was always inclined to let things slide.
But I had not let things slide this time, not in Paris. All the more to be analysed, the reasons probed. What would a judge think? What would he say to me?
‘Do you consider yourself a sane and reasonable man, Mr. Scott?’
‘I have always believed so.’
‘Then you must be inexcusably guilty of murder.’
‘I don’t know. I don’t altogether feel it.’
‘But if you feel you are not altogether guilty you must to some extent be insane.’
‘Why? Why? Reasonable men sometimes in their lives do unreasonable things.’
After the Act Page 13
