VISITORS TO THE CRESENT

by MARY HOCKING

  As they edged forward. Harper wondered whether their movements were visible from that front window; the angle of vision would be bad, but he would have thought it just possible.

  From behind the stone wall a man began to shout again, telling the men in the cottage that he would give them ten minutes. This time he was not answered by machine-gun fire.

  Edward heard the voice as he leant against the wall. He felt drained, as though he had suffered a severe haemorrhage. He did not take in the words; but the voice itself, rather stilted, with a faint London accent, evoked a series of visual images – policemen, jury, judge . . . The images stood between himself and Sonya; they came to him in the guise of deliverers, even though they offered only arrest, trial, and punishment.

  He heard rapid footsteps crossing the floor above. Action of some kind was now unavoidable. He looked through the window, searching for a glimpse of the deliverers. He found more difficulty than he had expected in reconciling himself to this bleak end to his long journey. Something stirred in the empty vault of his body; an obstinate longing, too faint for hope, surviving beyond all reason. He heard the footsteps coming nearer, down the stairs, across the hall. He prayed, because prayer had been a habit of his youth, that he might not be completely abandoned, that he might yet be spared the final, irrevocable judgement.

  ‘Are you dead, or just asleep?’

  Edward scarcely felt the blow which cut his mouth; he was only aware of the hands, scarred and bleeding, that tried to wrest the machine-gun from him.

  ‘Ten minutes!’ Vickers was saying. ‘Did you believe that? It probably means they are moving in now.’

  If that was the case, Edward did not want them to be mown down before they could bear him away to the cold security of a cell. He clung to the machine-gun. He clung to it while Vickers beat and kicked him; when a particularly violent blow in the stomach felled him, he clutched at Vickers’s ankles bringing him to the ground. The machine-gun was abandoned now. Edward twined his arms round Vickers, and although Vickers beat his head on the floor, he did not relax his grip. Janzen, disturbed by the noise, rushed in; it seemed to him that Vickers must have lost his nerve completely, and he flung himself on top of him, tearing him away from Edward. Edward crawled to the machine-gun and toppled it out of the window; then he huddled back against the wall and watched as the police tumbled into the room.

  Janzen put up a strong resistance. But Vickers was helpless from the start; although he thrashed about wildly he was given no chance to rend and maul. Once or twice, Edward saw his head rear up above the shoulders of his captors, jerking grotesquely like a puppet figure hoisted in a carnival. They did not savage him, which alone might have shored up his pride, but bore him down slowly and relentlessly. When at last he was still, and only then. Harper walked across to him. Vickers looked at Harper, almost as though he were a friend who had betrayed him, but in whom some spark of feeling might still be ignited.

  ‘Why don’t you hit me? You’re safe now, you cowardly bastard.’

  He was like a man pleading for salvation. But Harper had managed to subdue his own personality; whatever feeling he had at this moment was masked behind a stony, indifferent officialdom against which Vickers’s anguished appeal foundered helplessly.

  ‘Mr. Vickers,’ he intoned, ‘I must warn you . . .’

  Vickers spat in his face.

  ‘Take him away.’

  Harper’s voice was as unemotional as though he had just arrested someone for stealing from a fruit stall. They led Vickers out.

  The young constable who was standing over Edward muttered:

  ‘What about this little runt?’

  Edward had scarcely any room in which to manreuvre, but he twisted his head to one side, trying to hide his face against the wall. Yet his eyes still darted quick, furtive glances at the men around him. The contempt in Janzen’s eyes as he was dragged past him did not escape Edward; he saw it mirrored in the eyes of the young constable; and he remembered Sonya. Contempt, always contempt. It was a verdict from which, it seemed, there could be no appeal.

  Harper, seeing Saneck slumped against the wall, thought how desolate he looked, like a rag doll which has been torn, battered and finally rejected by the human family. He motioned the constable to take him away and then walked into the hall. At the front door he saw that the mist had lifted, the moon was shining from a clear, cold sky on the rough stone wall and the jagged spikes of broken glass; there was a harshness in the air that caught his breath. He leant against the door-post, trembling and suddenly half-afraid. Behind him, the uniformed superintendent was talking to the constable and Harper found that Saneck was a few feet away from him. In a pause which seemed endless, they faced one another; although Saneck was handcuffed to the constable, he and Harper might have been alone, engaged in a struggle without words or any meaning which either of them could fathom. There was a question in Saneck’s eyes, a fugitive, uncertain longing which, as he looked at Harper, seemed to flare up in searing desperation. Harper, who a moment ago had wanted to stretch out his hand to the man, to assure him that there was a place in the pattern for the weak and for those who seem to have failed, now found himself unable to act, almost submerged by a force which threatened to bear him down. He braced himself against the door-post, and as he did so he felt that the weight of the whole crumbling structure was supported by his shoulders so that he dared not move a muscle; and all the time Saneck’s eyes raked him mercilessly. He would not withdraw his eyes from the other man’s; but he felt faint, as though he were losing blood, and as he grew weaker Saneck seemed to grow stronger, boring into him like a beast of prey until Harper thought to himself: ‘I shan’t be able to stand much more of this.’

  And then it was over – perhaps it had lasted no longer than half a minute; the constable was taking Saneck away and the uniformed superintendent had Harper by the arm.

  ‘Too much for you?’ the man enquired, indulgently adding to Harper’s miseries. ‘I expect that crack on the head pulled you down.’

  They made their way to the car, a stumbling, unsteady process as far as Harper was concerned. Lying back in its merciful darkness he suffered with rare passivity the other’s good-natured ministrations. He watched the small houses come to life on either side of the road, the bright squares of windows framing scenes which seemed to him idyllically homely and uncomplicated. Now that his defences were broken, he was helpless to resist Jessica Holt. She invaded his thoughts, disturbing, tormenting, filling the future with hope and an agonizing uncertainty which made him, in a brief, unsteady moment, envy Edward Saneck who had reached the end of this particular journey.

  ‘If we hadn’t waited so long, you’d have been home in bed and none the worse for wear,’ his companion admonished him cheerfully. ‘We didn’t gain a damn thing waiting about like that.’

  II

  It was early morning when Edward lay back in his cell. Through the bars of the small, high window he could see the brick wall on the other side of the well. He looked at it thoughtfully, but without dismay; it was a view with which he would, no doubt, become familiar.

  He delved into his mind, gingerly, as he might have probed a bad tooth; he repeated names, Sonya, Blantyre; he even tried to revive old terrors. But there was no response; the nerve which linked him to the past had, it seemed, been severed. Fear had gone and the dialogue in the mind was stilled at last. He continued the experiment with clinical detachment. He found he could identify himself without shame: ‘I was one of those who could not bear the burden of the day. But what I had to give, I gave.’ It was sad, poetic, and very final, like a stone epitaph rearing up to mark the end of a journey. Afterwards, the curtain of the dark should have come down on Edward Saneck.

  And so it might have done, but for that astonishing moment when he had faced Harper. He was still unable to understand what had happened. He knew that their eyes had met, and that where he had expected to see only a reflection of the universal contempt he had found a troubled compassion
. After that he had been fired with a kind of madness, as though a light had appeared above an abyss. He had fought towards that faint glimmer of hope with a ruthless savagery he had never known he possessed; clawing his way across a human bridge that might yet lead him to a place on the far side of despair.

  Now, when the frenzy had subsided, the significance of what had happened seemed in doubt. The view from the other side of the bridge was not encouraging. He looked at the brick wall beyond the window; no ridges to offer a foothold nor crevices for the groping fingers. Better to have lain down quietly in the twilight calm of the stone epitaph. Now there would never be peace again, only a long, grinding climb up a mountain which had no summit. He had swung out over a precipice at the moment when someone else had been there to take the first intolerable agony of strain. But now he himself would have to make a contribution to the struggle; he would have to inch his way up the steep rock face with aching wrists and lacerated fingers, while each cramped breath speared his lungs. When he rested, as he rested now, the pain would lie dormant. But it would be there, ready to grapple with him as soon as he found sufficient courage to fight for the next foothold.

  Mary Hocking

  Born in London in 1921, Mary was educated at Haberdashers’ Aske’s Girls School, Acton. During the Second World War she served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (Wrens) attached to the Fleet Air Arm Meteorology branch and then briefly with the Signal Section in Plymouth.

  Writing was in her blood. Juggling her work as a local government officer in Middlesex Education Department with writing, at first short stories for magazines and pieces for The Times Educational Supplement, she then had her first book, The Winter City, published in 1961.

  The book was a success and enabled Mary to relinquish her full time occupation to devote her time to writing. Long before family sagas had become cult viewing, she had embarked upon the `Fairley Family’ trilogy – Good Daughters, Indifferent Heroes, and Welcome Strangers – books which give her readers a faithful, realistic and uncompromising portrayal of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times, between the years of 1933 and 1946.

  For many years she was an active member of the `Monday Lit’, a Lewes-based group which brought in current writers and poets to speak about their work, an enthusiastic supporter of Lewes Little Theatre, and worshipped at the town’s St Pancras RC Church.

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  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus Ltd 1962

  This edition published 2016 by Bello

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan

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  ISBN 978-1509-8192-18 EPUB

  ISBN 978-1509-8191-95 HB

  ISBN 978-1509-8192-01 PB

  Copyright © Mary Hocking 1962

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