by Julian Gloag
“You mean that you have now changed your mind about the matter?”
“No. I haven’t changed none. That—what I said then, it wasn’t true.”
“Mrs. Payne, it is my duty to warn you—it is a very grave admission to make that you lied under oath.”
Mrs. Payne opened her mouth, but the judge forestalled her. “Mrs. Payne, you must consider what Mr. Bartlett has said. This would be an admission of perjury. You would be saying that you perjured yourself. Do you fully understand that?”
Mrs. Payne nodded. “Yes, sir. I mean, my Lord. I hoped it wouldn’t … wouldn’t, but there’s no help for it. What I said then wasn’t true. Mrs. S. wasn’t afraid of pain. She believed in living. She’d have never made away with herself because she was in suffering, however terrible it might be. She’d have thought that was cowardly.”
Bartlett paused, waiting for her to say more. And then he said, “If this is so, if this is what you truly thought, why did you lie at the coroner’s inquest?”
Slowly, a deep breath, “For Junie’s sake.”
“And how would that have helped June, Mrs. Payne?”
“She thought—Junie thought it was her fault, in a way.”
“But it was in no way her fault, was it? She was absolved by everyone, Dr. Yardley, the coroner himself, of the slightest negligence.”
“Well, you see—it wasn’t exactly her fault. It wasn’t her fault. But she, well, she was the cause of it.”
“In what way?”
“It doesn’t matter me telling, now Junie’s dead too.” A tear trickled down Mrs. Payne’s nose, but her voice was steady enough. “Mrs. S. was always worrying, see? Worrying that she was in Junie’s way. She said it several times to me, but I never gave it much attention really. Not till later. Without Junie, Mrs. Singer couldn’t really do nothing. She was always urging June to go out and that, but she knew she couldn’t. And she felt she was spoiling Junie’s chances. She said to me once, she said, ‘There’s nothing worse than a young girl wasting her life on a silly old cripple.’ And then when she saw June so happy about Mr. Maddox and all, why, I think she made up her mind there and then. She didn’t believe in standing in someone else’s way, see?”
There was a long deep silence.
Bartlett roused himself. “I see. Thank you, Mrs. Payne. I have no more questions.” He sat down.
“Mrs. Payne,” said Pollen, “I will keep you but a moment. It is still your belief, is it not, that June Singer was in love with the accused?”
“Yes.”
“And the indications that June gave you of Maddox being in love with her—you still believe in the validity of these, that he was as much in love with her as she with him?”
“Yes. And—”
Pollen was already lowering himself to his seat. He halted. “Yes, Mrs. Payne?”
“Can I say something, sir?”
“Please do.”
“He was always a perfect gentleman in the way he treated Junie, and I’ve never believed he done it. In my opinion it was one of these night prowlers.”
Mr. Pollen’s mouth opened. The judge leaned over towards the witness. “I’m sure,” he said, “that you are quite sincere in what you say, Mrs. Payne. But we cannot allow such unsubstantiated opinions to be expressed in court. Members of the jury, Mrs. Payne’s last remarks will be taken from the record, and you must forget them. Dismiss them from your mind.”
31
He walked up and down the room, four paces forward, four back. He wanted to look out of a window, to the country, hills.
He pushed the chair against the wall and stood on it. Vertical bars, glass, wire mesh. A tall chimney far away. A piece of sky. It was forever raining.
She’d had a better view than this. A bomb site. What was it? A vacant lot. What had she done that evening? Shut the door and turned on the light and gone across to draw the curtains. She must have glanced out of the window. Twilight—no, darkness, then; it was February. Winter. Begun in summer, ended in winter.
Had she lain down on the bed and wept? Deciding, quiet and businesslike and deserted, to still the tremors in her belly. He remembered the smell of the bed, of the sheets, on the morning. The smell of life on the morning of death.
She must have remembered the day at Woodley.
“Wish you were free to lend me a hand on the weekend, June.” Jokingly.
“I am.”
“What about your mother? I thought you had to look after her.”
“Mum’s in the hospital this week. It’s her annual check-up. They make all sorts of tests and things. So I could come in and help Saturday.”
“Come down to Woodley then. A day in the country would do you good.”
She had come, fresh and delicate in her white summer frock. And she had sat, demure as Georgia, in the front seat of the car as he drove her to the house.
“I hope it’s not too much trouble for Mrs. Maddox, my coming.”
“She’s not here. She’s down on the coast with Georgia. We always go away from the end of June to the end of August. But I couldn’t make it this weekend.”
They lunched off tomatoes and cold overdone roast beef, which Willy had wrapped in greaseproof paper and marked Saturday. And he’d opened a bottle of the better claret. They’d worked hard all day until the phone call, which she had answered automatically.
And Jordan could hear now, tinny in his memory, Tom’s voice: “I say, old man, whose are those dulcet tones at your end of the line? What are you up to? Tiddlywinks, old man?”
“My secretary, she came down to clear—”
“Don’t have to explain it to me. You can trust me. You know that. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil—that’s me, except professionally, of course, ha ha. Norah thought you might be lonely and would like to pop over for a drink. But I’ll tell her you’re all fixed up …”
He’d put down the phone and turned to June and they’d called it a day.
She guarded her camera in her lap as they drove over to Round Hill. In the garden of the Goat she insisted on her photographs and Jordan was pleased to please her, although normally he hated those dead grins of the past, the idiocy, which one would prefer to forget, frozenly exposed. Even the elderly mute pipe smoker yielded to her eagerness and gravely snapped them together.
They sat on the crooked bench and drank beer and watched the summer evening light going gently from the Sussex hills. Others came and chattered and laughed, but left them alone on their bench. It grew cool and June put a cardigan over her shoulders. He helped her. It was easy and tender.
He did not know what they talked of. But into his mind slipped a line of Trevor’s favourite hymn: “Let all thy converse be sincere …” And as he spoke, the quality of unctuousness melted from the sentiment and he smiled with involuntary fondness.
“What are you smiling at?”
“Oh, the light. The beer. You. The ease of evening.” His characteristically deprecating gesture didn’t diminish the promise of the dusk.
They ate at Cochrane’s—ten miles away, due south. But it was Saturday night, and they had to wait an hour in the Jacobean cocktail bar before eating. Willy wouldn’t have been caught dead in the place. They drank Americanos among the glowing copper and the bulbous fakes.
“It’s a lovely place, isn’t it?”
“Pure Jacobean cocktail.” Then he smiled. “Yes, it is.”
“Are these very strong?”
“They’ve got a bit more pep in them than a glass of cold water.”
“I expect I’ll go to sleep on the train.”
“Oh, forget the train. I’ll drive you home.”
“What, all the way to Putney? Oh no, I couldn’t—”
“Well, you’re going to miss the last train anyway. The alternative would be to spend the night at Woodley.”
She put her head on one side. “Thank you then. But it does seem an awful bother.”
“It’s a lovely drive on a summer’s night.”
An
d it was. Fifty minutes to Putney.
“Just drop me on the corner.”
“No no, I’ll take you to the house.”
When he stopped and switched off in the silent street, they sat for a few moments. He looked at her shadowed face. Her flesh dived darkly into the whiteness of her dress. He could smell her. He could touch her.
“It was the loveliest day I’ve ever had,” she murmured.
Then they were standing on the pavement. He shook her hand and mumbled, “We must do it again some time.” He watched her go into the house; then he turned to the car. As he drove back to Woodley, he felt a mingling of excitement and relief. He meandered through Kingston and Hampton Court and Esher and Guildford, over the base of the Hog’s Back and down into the valley where the mist hung ghostly about the road. It was a calm night and fresh and cool.
He had a whiskey before going to bed. At four o’clock his own shout woke him from a nightmare. For a second he remembered it—a great darkness suddenly and horribly illuminated. And then it was gone. He lay back sweating and soon fell asleep without dreams.
The next several days, as he packed up to go home, it was often on the tip of his tongue to ask June for a drink. But he didn’t. An old unrecognised eagerness dwindling over the weeks, lost amidst printers’ schedules and proofs and the rained-out seaside summer—which was no more than to be expected. And when she had given him the photo, shyly, he had been clumsy; the black-and-white image of her had frozen him.
Woodley to Waterloo, Waterloo to Woodley, morning and night the regularity of his own thin reflection in the window, and a detached distaste for the passing landscape. The tactical withdrawal over years, become so automatic that he could not even recognise his troops had been committed in the first place.
He got down from the chair.
He stood in the centre of the room and looked round. Bed, chair, table, basin—the simple necessities of shelter, no more.
Poor Annie, he thought.
He spoke aloud, “Annie?” But he was not really surprised.
32
That June—that other June—he came down from Cambridge happy.
He put his bags in the left luggage at Paddington and took a taxi to Sutlif & Maddox. He looked out of the window at old, grey London and everything seemed especially good. He relaxed in the genial knowledge that something better awaited him. For the first time that he could ever remember, he was looking forward to returning to Sibley. And Annie.
“Hello, Jordan, you’re looking well. You know Miss Lawley, don’t you?”
“Mr. Jordan.” Miss Lawley inclined her head with acid grace, bitter perhaps at having to promote him at long last from Master to Mister.
“She’s the law in this office, aren’t you, Miss Lawley? Well, let’s have lunch. I thought we’d go to the Berkeley.”
“A celebration, Colin?”
“Oh, I don’t know. A change is always good. You’ll have enough of Blain’s and the club when you come into the business. Mustn’t fill you with publisher’s gloom too early.”
Jordan smiled. Already he knew of Colin’s unspoken worry that Jordan would not join the firm, and the rueful joviality that he used to probe Jordan’s intentions.
But a drink soon soothed Colin.
“Have a martini, Jordan? I don’t care for them much myself, but I’m told this place makes the best martinis in town. Got the knack from the Americans in the war, I expect.”
“Alright, I’ll be American.”
“Well, what sort of a first year have you had, old chap?”
“Pretty good. Very good.”
“How were the prelims? Or shouldn’t I ask?”
“They weren’t bad. I quite enjoyed them, actually, although there isn’t much of any interest at this point.”
“I wonder whether you’ll turn out to be academically inclined.”
“Not a hope. I’m not keen enough on the proper things. I go off on tangents that would give the professional heart failure.”
“That’s not a bad sort of a mind for a publisher to have, though.”
“A medical publisher?”
“How like your father you sound sometimes. He used to call our books the corpses. I was the chief necrophiliac. He was always trying to get us to publish something that was alive, as he put it.”
“But he didn’t succeed, did he?” Jordan jerked back his head as he took a harsh mouthful of martini.
“He once got me to put out a book of verse. He told me it was just the thing for us. Death Sentences it was called; by a fellow named Oliver Beaney. Unreadable muck. Charles got me absolutely tight one night and then told me the next morning that I’d agreed to do it. He had my illegible signature to prove it.”
“How did it do?”
“I printed five hundred—you could get away with that in those days—and twenty years later I still had four hundred and sixty-odd in inventory. I never remaindered them. I didn’t have the heart to, perhaps. They always reminded me of Charles, you see, breezing into the office, slapping everything in sight till the dust flew, giving Miss Lawley a great kiss. She seemed to like it. So I let Death Sentences gather dust. Then just before the war a curious thing happened. I’m damned if there wasn’t a run on the book. In two years I didn’t have a single copy left.”
“Did you reprint it?”
“No. No, I didn’t. The war came, and the paper shortgage. But I don’t think I’d have done a reprint in any event. I came across a copy only the other day when I was in York. Priced at four guineas, believe it or not—it was far from a mint copy, too.”
“Perhaps there’s money in poetry after all—or at any rate a diversified list. Have I got that right?”
Colin laughed. “You have. Have another martini.”
“I will.”
“Another odd thing about that book. Lately I’ve had several requests from anthologists for permission to use some of Beaney’s poems. It’s put me in rather a quandary. I can’t find Beaney.”
“Maybe he’s dead. What was he like?”
“Never saw him. Never had an address for him either. Charles got the contract signed. We still owe Beaney about sixty quid in royalties, but I doubt if he’ll ever collect it. To tell you the truth, I always had an idea that Death Sentences was one of Charles’s spoofs.”
“You mean he wrote it and …”
“It would have been like him. That’s really why I don’t make much effort to find Mr. Beaney. I think it would amuse Charles. I could almost feel him grinning over my shoulder the other day in the club. I found myself sitting next to Stewart. By mistake of course—he’s a pompous ass to my mind, but he’s supposed to know about these things. So I asked about Beaney.”
“What did he say?”
“Guff—his usual unadulterated guff, but I enjoyed it. Something about it being, let’s see, ‘an agonized gem.’ I asked him how a gem could feel anything, let along agony. ‘That’s exactly the point, my dear Sutlif, exactly. It’s the hard and lacerating experience of non-feeling, of glitter without heart, the predicament of the non-sensory in a sensory world. The brilliant perfection of sterility.’ I may have got that mixed up, but the general tone’s right. I may say, telling Stewart that I’d published it completely made my lunch. He wouldn’t believe me at first. He’s as tight as an oyster, you know, but I got him to stand me a brandy, so impressed he was.” Colin emptied his glass. “Shall we order? Or do you think another round first?”
“Let’s have another,” Jordan said buoyantly. “Colin, I’d like to see a copy of Death Sentences.”
“I thought you might. I’ve got a copy for you put aside. You come back to the office after lunch and collect it.”
Colin’s shy, almost sly, fondness for him filled Jordan with gratitude. He felt a fleeting, tear-filled moment of benignity. Perhaps it was the gin, or the prospect of Sibley, or the hearsay evidence of his father. But really, of course, it was Annie. After dinner he would go down to the post office and knock on the post-office
door. And she would come and they would go walking out, formal, a little, at first, until the village was left behind and there were only fields about them. And then …
“I’m not opposed to a bit of diversification, Jordan. Charles wanted to do it all at once. And of course he wasn’t interested in publishing. He was interested in everything. But he wasn’t inclined to branch out a little here and a little there. No, he wanted to plant an entire new forest overnight. But I don’t say that S. and M. isn’t in a rut. It is. It’s a paying rut—but, well, I haven’t the imagination, or the energy, to change very much, you know. That doesn’t mean I’m not alive to the need. But somebody else will have to do it.”
Jordan touched his third martini to his lips. “You mean me?”
Colin smiled. “I hope you. I hope you very much, Jordan. It’s time we had a Maddox active in the firm again.”
They drank in silence for a while. They ordered, carefully, a large meal. And they would drink Montrachet.
“Trevor’s expecting you to get a first, you know.”
“He’s going to be disappointed. I’m not first-class material.”
“I wouldn’t say that. You may not get a first—and personally I don’t think it matters a damn what sort of degree you get—but that’s not to say you’re not first-class material. Unfortunate phrase. If something interests you. What about that exhibition of yours?”
“Sheer fluke. If it hadn’t been for … Well, I just scored a lucky hit.”
“I see.” Colin nodded. He ate with deliberation but rapidly. “Trevor’s a bit worried about you.”
“Worried about me?”
“Yes.” Colin put his knife and fork together. “Yes. About this girl. Annie Brierly, isn’t it?”
The elation of gin drained immediately. “Annie?”
“Yes. She’s the girl you’ve been—seeing. Isn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“Serious?” Colin didn’t look at him, merely poured himself some more Montrachet.
“Yes. We’re—we’re going to get married.”
“Ah. Her mother just died. You know that, though?”
