For a few days after the act he had felt an intense urge to recommence writing his diary, and suffered the sense of deprivation that a smoker feels on giving up cigarettes. He actually bought a notebook and sat down to write in it, but the words refused to flow as they had done in the past. After a couple of days in which he found almost nothing to say, he tore out the sheets on which he had written and burned them. This gesture seemed to have a symbolic value. After it he was better able to accept that he had entered a world in which the pressures and pleasures of the past no longer existed. He did not want the things that Easonby Mellon had taken so greedily, nor was he the Arthur Brownjohn who had been married to Clare. The act had in some mysterious way set him free to begin a new life. He felt himself able to go to London.
He went to the Lektreks’ office in Romany House and found there a few orders and several sharp letters from his American suppliers asking why they had not heard from him. In a burst of energy he typed twenty letters in a day, informing suppliers and customers that because of family troubles Lektreks was closing down. Then he invited Elsom to lunch and told him the news.
‘But you can’t do that.’ Elsom was amazed and indignant.
‘Why not?’
‘I told you, GBD are interested. You’re throwing away money.’
Although the problems of the past were remote he recognised that they existed, and that it would be foolish to let GBD see the Lektreks books. He said curtly that the closing down of Lektreks was his affair.
‘Of course it is.’ Elsom spat out bits of food in his earnestness. ‘But I’m speaking as a friend, Arthur, you understand. You can’t do anything but lose by this.’
‘It’s what Clare would have wished,’ he said piously, and added with more truth, ‘It’s for my own peace of mind.’ The meal was concluded in gloomy silence.
There remained the question of Easonby Mellon’s relics and the diary. They could not be left indefinitely at Waterloo Station, but he had not faced up to the problem of their disposal. When he had collected them, where were they to be buried or burned? It struck him suddenly that he must buy not only a house but a car. If he possessed a car, the disposition of Mellon’s belongings would be simplicity itself.
No sooner had the idea occurred to him than the purchase of a car seemed a matter of urgency. He had learned to drive in the army during the war, but he took a few lessons and surprised his instructor by his aptitude and the quickness of his reactions. There was little point in having a car until he had passed the driving test, but he was unable to deny himself the pleasure of spending money. He did not buy a new car because part of the pleasure lay in bargaining about the price, and after visiting half a dozen dealers and trying out twice that number of cars he bought a two-year-old Triumph, guaranteed by the dealer to have had only one owner and to be in splendid condition. The car was driven back to The Laurels and put into the garage, which had been cleared to receive it. He waited eagerly for the day when he would take the test.
In the meantime he was engaged in selling The Laurels and buying a house on the Sussex downs. He slightly scandalised Jaggard, the estate agent, who hinted delicately that the recent tragedy might affect the price, by asking what would be a reasonable figure and then naming a sum two hundred and fifty pounds below it. The Laurels was bought by a civil servant who had a wife and family, and the sale was completed in August. Arthur had, however, already moved out. There was a sale of effects, a symbolic severance of the bonds that linked him to Clare. He included all of their household belongings in this sale, even things that would obviously be needed in his new home like kitchen utensils and the lawn mower. He did not attend the sale, but was pleased to see that the picture of Mr Slattery had fetched only three pounds, the cost of the frame.
He said as few goodbyes as possible. What, after all, linked him to Fraycut now that life with Clare was over? The Paynes, the Elsoms, one or two others, said how sorry they were to see him go, but he did not feel that they were in any way his friends. Perhaps it was a good thing that Arthur Brownjohn, starting a new life, should have no friends. He gave Susan a cheque for a hundred pounds, saying that Clare would have wished her to have it, and was embarrassed by a flood of tears. He had a slightly disturbing encounter when he was almost knocked down while crossing a street one day by a car which swung without warning out of a side road.
The driver poked his head out of the window and shouted at him. ‘You want to bloody well look where you’re going.’ It was Doctor Hubble. He got out of the car and stood swaying slightly. ‘Oh, it’s you. How are you? Hear you’re clearing out.’
Arthur agreed, although they were not the words he would have chosen.
‘Don’t blame you. Shouldn’t want to stay myself in the circumstances.’ What did he mean by that? ‘Still haven’t got the chap who did it?’
‘No.’
Hubble stood glaring at him, and Arthur felt a twinge of uneasiness. How could he ever have tried deliberately to deceive a man who resembled more than anything else a dangerous wild animal? Then the doctor stuck out his hand, said ‘She was a damned fine woman,’ got back into the car and drove away.
Before he left he went to see Coverdale. The Inspector’s reception of him was friendly but gloomy. There was no news of Mellon.
‘We’ve found somebody who saw him on the platform. Carrying a blue suitcase.’ A shiver went through Arthur’s frame. This was the suitcase in the Left Luggage office. If the police ever thought of searching there…but why should they do any such thing? Coverdale was still talking. ‘…up in London I guess, hiding out. A crook like Mellon knows plenty of places. But we’ll find him.’
‘You don’t think he’s gone abroad.’
‘I don’t. One thing, far as we can tell he’s got no passport. No, he’s hiding out. Trouble is, we don’t know who his friends are. Can’t find out how he got to know your wife either.’
Arthur shook his head to show that he also could not imagine how this had come about. Then he said with careful slowness, ‘You’ve questioned his own wife again, I suppose?’
Coverdale stared at him. The shiny lumps on his face were more than usually apparent. ‘You hadn’t heard?’
‘Heard what?’
‘She’s dead. Put her head in the gas oven.’
On the wall behind the Inspector there was a photograph of police sports, with a man doing the pole vault, twisting over the bar. Arthur stared at this photograph.
‘Can’t think what made her do it. Wish I had talked to her again, got to the bottom of all that rubbish about Mellon being an agent.’
‘When did it happen?’
‘Fortnight ago. It was in the papers. She left the usual note, can’t go on, that kind of thing.’
A secretary came in with letters to be signed. Coverdale said, ‘We’ll keep in touch. Don’t worry. The usual channels work slowly sometimes, but everything comes through them in the end.’
After leaving the station he walked to a small public garden and sat down on one of the green wooden benches surrounding a dry fountain topped by a mournful bronze bust. Below the bust it said: ‘These gardens are the gift of Ezekiel Jones, citizen of this borough, educator and philanthropist.’
He knew that he should feel sorrow and remorse, but in fact he felt nothing. What had she said to him on that last evening? Can’t live without you, I shall kill myself, something like that. People really do kill themselves, this is something that happens, he thought. He tried to remember what Joan looked like, but was unable to bring her face before his eyes. He seemed insulated from emotion, as though some fibrous barrier had been interposed between his feelings and what went on in the world.
An old man sat down on the bench, produced a bag of bread from his pocket and began to break the bread and throw bits to the pigeons clustering round him. One of the pieces fell beside Arthur’s foot. He picked it up and threw it to a bird that seemed weaker than the rest. The pigeon looked at the bread, pecked at it ineffectually, then moved aw
ay. None of the other pigeons came near it.
He found a house soon after he moved into a Brighton hotel and began to look for one. He found the house quickly because he knew what he wanted. The area between Devil’s Dyke and Brighton, which he remembered with pleasure, proved distressingly urbanised and unattractive. Perhaps the beauty of it had been invented by him and it had always been like this, for he learned with surprise that a railway had run to the Dyke before the war. The triangle to the east of this area, however, topped by Ditchling Beacon, with its small villages and relics of ancient earthworks, fascinated him. He knew from the map that this was not where he had come in childhood, yet it seemed to him that he recognised landmarks, the Iron Age fort of Hollingbury, Plumpton Plain, and the black and white windmills known as Jack and Jill. It was here, near to the road running from Ditchling to Brighton, that he bought a small bungalow, surprising another estate agent by his acceptance of the price asked for it. The bungalow had been built in the nineteen thirties, of ochre brick now weathered to neutral brown. It had a square living-room with French windows, two bedrooms of which one was minute, a surprisingly large kitchen with a good deal of electrical equipment in it, and a bathroom with green tiles on the wall and mustard coloured plastic tiles on the floor. Geese flew on the living-room walls. It was not pretty, but nothing could have been less like The Laurels, and the setting was delightful, sheltered in a small cleft between hills. Outside there was a garage and a quarter of an acre of wilderness which had once been a garden. He was able to move in before the end of August, and he drove the Triumph into the garage himself, for a week before the move he passed his driving test.
Almost the first thing he did was to put up his mother’s watercolours in the sitting-room. For some reason he did not take down the flying geese. Did he leave them because, like the watercolours, they would have offended Clare? Had he bought the bungalow because it was what she would have described as a potty little place? He could not be sure, but in any case this was a line of thought that he did not care to pursue. The furniture came from a Brighton store. It was all new and mostly finished in light woods, polished pine and afromosia. On the afternoon that he moved in, there was a knock on the door. He opened it to find a diminutive couple standing there smiling at him.
‘Mr Brownjohn?’ The little man took off a check cap and presented a card. ‘George Brodzky.’
‘And I’m Mary,’ the little woman chirped. ‘We’re your neighbours.’
‘Neighbours?’
‘Over the hill. From Dunroamin. You must have passed it. So amusing, English names, are they not?’
That was George. Mary chimed in. ‘And we thought as you were moving in – I mean, we know what it’s like – you would come to tea.’
‘Come to tea!’ The note of horror in his voice escaped them.
‘Tea is on the hob.’ Little George rubbed his hands.
‘You’re very kind but–’
‘I won’t take no for an answer,’ said little Mary. ‘I’ve made some buns, and although I say it myself my buns are good. And you’ll find the men get on much better without you, isn’t that right?’ She called this out to the foreman, who agreed enthusiastically. Arthur had been altogether too fussy about occasional bumps and splinterings.
‘Her buns are the tops,’ said George.
He went to tea with the dismal knowledge that he would regret it. The Brodzkys lived over the brow of the hill, five minutes’ walk away, in a bigger version of his bungalow. Brodzky was a Jewish tailor who had come over as a refugee from the Nazis, and had evidently done rather well. Sufficiently well, at least, to retire and buy the bungalow which had been named Dunroamin in what Mary told George was the English tradition. It was not about themselves that they wanted to talk, however, but about their new neighbour. They knew he was alone, but what had happened to his wife? Arthur said she had died recently, and did not expand on it. He did not need to, however, for Mary Brodzky read about every case of criminal violence in the newspaper.
‘Not the Mr Brownjohn?’ She saw from Arthur’s hesitancy that he was. ‘George, Mr Brownjohn’s wife was – this was the case that – you know, you read about it –’
‘The lady who was murdered?’ Little George rubbed his hands together.
She lowered her voice respectfully at mention of the tabooed word. ‘Such a terrible thing, and they still haven’t got the man, have they?’
No doubt the manner of Clare’s death would have become known quickly in any case, but he felt that acceptance of the invitation had been disastrous. When he went into the local general shop or into the nearby pub, conversation ceased for a moment before being abruptly resumed, and he saw people looking at him with sidelong expectancy. Mary Brodzky twice telephoned him with invitations to meet people, both of which he refused, and one day she called to ask if she could do any shopping for him in Brighton. He replied politely that he was driving in himself. On the following day George called. It was raining.
‘We have here in the village our society for amateur dramatics. I am to ask if you would like to join.’ His smile was wide.
‘No, thank you.’
‘It is very amusing. Perhaps if I should explain it –’
Brodzky was not wearing a coat. Rain spotted his shoulders. It was outrageously rude not to ask him in. ‘Go away,’ Arthur said.
Brodzky was dumbfounded. ‘I beg your pardon?’
He was dismayed to hear his voice rising to an undignified squeak. ‘I don’t let nosy parkers into my house.’ He stepped back and slammed the door. After that there were no further invitations from the Brodzkys, and they did not acknowledge each other in the street.
That was really the end of his relations with the village. In the shop he was greeted politely but without warmth, and he stopped going to the pub. The milkman said good day to him and the butcher delivered three times a week. The vicar called once, but lost interest when he learned that his new parishioner did not go to church. The Brodzkys had offered to try to find a woman who would come in and do for him, but their relations had been severed soon afterwards and he felt reluctant to allow anybody to intrude on his affairs, asking personal questions and poking about among his things. The bungalow was small, and it was quite easy to clean it himself without the nosy assistance of some Sussex Susan. He had escaped from them all, Susans, Elsoms, Paynes and the rest. He was, as he had often wished to be, alone.
He found sufficient occupation inside and outside the house. He bought a multi-purpose electric tool with which he sanded and polished the floors of both living-room and bedrooms, repainted them, built some bookshelves and also a cupboard for the living-room. The making and fitting of this cupboard, which was made of a polished wood named sangrosa, gave him great emotional satisfaction, and he put a small compartment inside it, with its own separate doors. The latch on these inner doors did not fit perfectly and had a tendency to come open, but still he was delighted by his own skill. The garden also took up a good deal of time. What could be done with a quarter of an acre? He bought half a dozen books on gardening and cut out articles that appeared in the papers. He would have liked to see things flowering immediately, but it proved that September was not a good time for planting. However, there were things that could be done. He reduced the wilderness of the lawn with a scythe, mowed it, and then spiked the mossy weedy surface with an aerator. Every day for a week he carried out destructive operations, pulling up weeds and nettles and burning them in a new kind of incinerator which he bought. Sodium chlorate extinguished weeds on the paths. There was broken fencing at the back of the house which he mended with new palings and wire. He worked every morning and afternoon, eating a quick lunch of bread and cheese with an urgency he could not have explained even to himself. In the evening he cooked something, often out of a tin, and settled down to read the papers and watch television. The news seemed unreal to him, the capers on the screen even more insignificant, and watching them he often fell asleep.
One day he took the tra
in to London, went across to Waterloo Station, collected the blue suitcase and came straight back again. In spite of his advance trepidation he felt no flicker of fear when he handed over the ticket and was given the suitcase. He would have been quite prepared to meet Coverdale at the station. Easonby Mellon had had a blue suitcase, he was carrying one too. What was strange about that? He was strong in the assurance of success. He would not have been so boastful as to call what he had done perfect, for he recognised that he had been helped by one or two fortuitous circumstances like Mr Lillicrapp’s sight of Easonby Mellon leaving The Laurels, but still he was satisfied.
He deliberately delayed opening the suitcase until the evening, leaving it to be savoured like a favourite sweet. As a further congratulatory gesture, a measure of Brownjohn’s confidence in Brownjohn, he opened the sangrosan cupboard, considered the bottles which had been lined up there – gin, whisky, vodka – and opened the whisky. Gobble gobble, went the liquid in the glass, giving him a delicious feeling, not unlike that felt by Easonby Mellon when having a bit of nonsense. A zizz of soda and there it was, ready for drinking. He drank. Then he took the little key from his ring and turned it in the lock of the suitcase. Was everything there? He checked, hugging himself.
Item. One suit in loud gingery tweed, jacket and trousers only, in good condition.
Item. Tie decorated with small coloured horseshoes, sporty shirt and ditto socks.
Item. One fine head of glossy red-brown hair, one small beard of slightly different colour. One small bottle of spirit gum.
Item. One pair of contact lenses in small box.
The Man Who Killed Himself Page 13
