by Alec Waugh
He paused, allowing her time to think. She ran her mind back over various cases. The Armstrong case: that was more like the Düsseldorf case. The Greenwood case: there had been no conviction there. The Crippen case: that bore out Stewart’s argument. Thompson and Bywaters, Thorne, the Rouse case. Yes, it seemed true enough. In novels the murders were staged invariably against some fashionable back-ground. Bella Donna was the classic story: the murderess’s handbook, one might almost call it. But in real life it wasn’t a case of a jewelled woman in evening-dress dropping laudanum into a coffee-cup on the verandah of a Riviera bungalow, it was some wretched clerk serving weed-killer to a harridan twelve years his senior.
“It is true, isn’t it?” Stewart was insisting.
She nodded. Yes, it seemed true enough.
“Perhaps,” she suggested, “that’s why Miss Hardwick couldn’t believe in murder stories, because in point of fact they never are committed by the kind of people she meets.”
“Perhaps. But that’s not what I was thinking of. I was going to ask you if you realized why it was.”
She would have liked to have pondered the point about Miss Hardwick, but it was one of Stewart’s typical characteristics that he would never allow people to discuss what they themselves wanted to discuss, but would rush them on to whatever held his interest.
“Have you considered why it is that murders aren’t committed by the upper and upper middle classes?”
“I’ve not realized till this moment that they weren’t.”
“Start thinking about it now, then.”
“Well …”
There were a good many reasons that occurred to her.
“In the first place,” she said, “because they are more disciplined, more self-controlled. How often do you see people of that class losing tempers with one another? And then again …”
But he would not let her finish.
“No, no,” he interrupted her. “I didn’t mean that.”
He spoke impatiently. One of his less amiable characteristics was a refusal to listen to the expression of other people’s points of view. He was always asking questions. But they were rhetorical questions. He did not want his questions answered. He wanted himself to supply his own answers.
“There are no doubt a lot of secondary reasons why you don’t read about murders among the upper classes. But the main reason is that murders of that kind are not found out.”
“You mean the police …”
“Are bribed. Good heavens, no! There’s no need for that: nor for doctors to give false certificates. It’s simpler than that, far simpler. Murder is a job of work. If it’s undertaken by someone who’s inefficient, it’ll be a bungled piece of work. The ordinary person who finds himself in the kind of jam for which murder is the only satisfactory solution, is probably undertaking for the very first time in his life a difficult and individual job. Naturally, he makes a hash of it. He isn’t used to acting on his own responsibility. He behaves like a corporal who’s put in charge of a battalion. But if you took a man who’d been used to directing public companies and told him to organize the training programme of an infantry brigade, he’d be so used to acting on his own responsibility, on his own initiative, that he’d make a reasonable job of it. It would be the same with a murder. An organized human being who decided that someone had to be moved out of the way, would set about the job calmly and methodically and get it done.”
“Now really …”
“No, no. It’s true: quite true. Do you think a certain class too civilized to murder? You think that because people are entered in Debrett and have four-figure incomes that they don’t have fathers and aunts whose properties they’re waiting to inherit, wives and husbands that are making their lives intolerable for them. Of course they have. Only they set about it sensibly. No, no, Mrs. Montague, you can take it from me: murder may be a pretty hard job of work. But it’s not so difficult as people think. A great many more people get away with it than you’d imagine.”
He picked up the book she had been reading. It was one of the Famous Trials series. The Thompson-Bywater case.
“Oh, so you’re reading this. It’s interesting. As interesting as any case I know,” he said.
His interest surprised her.
“I shouldn’t have thought you’d have found it that.”
“Why not?”
“It was so obvious.”
“Obvious?”
“How could they have hoped to get away with that kind of murder?”
“That’s not the point.”
“Isn’t it?”
To him it might not be. He doubtless had some particular, some professional reason, for being interested in this case of a suburban wife whose romanticism working on the imagination of her young lover, had inspired if it had not planned a brutal murder. Her interest in the case lay in its stark beginnings, in the situation that had forced two people to face the necessity of crime.
In that suburban world of Ilford, Bywaters and Edith Thompson had felt themseves encaged just as two people here in Rodney might. The bars of the cage were not dissimilar : money, scandal, the difficulties of meeting, the certainty on the woman’s side that she must lose her lover because she could not offer him the things that a man wanted, or that men thought they wanted, were led by convention to believe they wanted—a home, a background, children. A parallel situation, more or less.
She could understand so well how Edith Thompson, tortured by the thought of losing Bywaters, had seen her husband as a barrier to happiness, realizing that while he lived there could be no happiness for her. She could understand how Edith Thompson, feeling that life without Bywaters would no longer be worth living, would see murder as the one alternative to suicide—the jungle choice—her life or her husband’s life, since she could not face life without her lover; could understand how Edith Thompson, looking at her husband across the breakfast table, had come to see the issue in straightforward terms: could understand how she had come to accept murder as her solution.
All that was plain. She could enter into Edith Thompson’s mood as clearly as, a few weeks back, she had entered into Emma Bovary’s. She could understand how Edith Thompson in her despair had longed for her husband’s death. That she could understand.
Yes, but the method, the absurd, clumsy method. How on earth could anyone have expected to get away with that? Poisoning, that first alternative. That was possible … If, that was to say, one was coldly, cruelly inhuman. But to watch the slow torturing of someone who had once been dear to one … No, that wasn’t possible. Edith Thompson had hated her husband. Yes, but even so … In books that was how people murdered. But wasn’t the very fact that Edith Thompson had been unable to carry through her plot the proof that no normal person, even when forced by abnormal circumstance into an abnormal situation, could carry through a crime of that kind? It was outside the scope of any human person. The safe way—and poisoning with powdered glass was a safe way—was the impossible way. But to turn from the safety of powdered glass to the brutality of a knife. What an incredible mistake : to have employed that method. Was there no other method? Some method that would be both safe and human. If there was such a method, why had not Mrs. Thompson found it? It was in that that the case interested her: that and only that. She had no time for young Stewart’s psychological interpretations.
She interrupted him.
“I’m tired of reading about trials. One’s reading about failures all the time. It gets depressing. I’d like to read the description of a successful murder.”
He laughed at that.
“There was a famous doctor who wrote a book explaining the different ways in which murder could be committed with impunity. His friends assured him that if he published it he’d be expelled from the B.M.A.”
“I’d like to read that book.”
“So would a lot of others. Life wouldn’t be very safe if that particular information was at everyone’s disposal.”
She smiled. She suppos
ed it wouldn’t.
Crime didn’t pay. How often did you hear that said ? And there were all these court cases to prove it didn’t. Just as there were all those bankruptcies to prove that it didn’t pay to play the market. But against those bankruptcies, there was the solid argument of the millionaires who could not have reached their position without running risks. Young Stewart had argued that an efficient person could get away with murder. What methods did they adopt, she wondered.
“I’d like to read the autobiography of just one murderer who got away with it,” she said.
She was tired of these trial books as once she had been tired of detective stories. They were both untrue in their separate ways. Detective stories told of murders that were not committed in that way by that kind of person. Trial stories told only half the truth. They described only the failures. They were as untrue to the essential facts of life as the Sunday-school novelettes that finished on a note of triumphant virtue with the wrongdoer punished.
This is the last of these books I’m reading, she decided, as she strolled from the car park to the library.
When Miss Hardwick offered her a judge’s Memoirs she shook her head. What was the good of reading that kind of book. She had read too many books like that, searching them for the calm of the confessional, of finding the situation that was the equivalent of her own, thinking how other women had acted in the circumstances that were parallel to hers, reading those books in a spirit of “There but for the grace of God go I,” in the same way that spinsters read the stories of fallen women. It was morbid. It was dangerous. It was in that way, in just that way that Edith Thompson had worked herself into hysteria. It was pointless, too, imagining that there was no way out. It was foolish of her to fancy that there was : morbid to let her brain dwell on such possibilities.
She shook her head. No, she did not want to read the judge’s Memoirs. She wanted to read quite another kind of book.
“Something more like the books you were reading a couple of months ago? Because if that is the kind of book you’d like, I’ve got just that kind here for you. I kept it specially. It isn’t everybody’s book. In fact,” and here Miss Hardwick paused to giggle, “I’m not at all sure that it’s the kind of book we ought to keep. It wouldn’t do for everybody. Such an odd title, too, Appointment in Samara”
23
Calmly, critically, Mary turned its pages. It was good. She could see that. If she had been given it when Barclay was in America she would have scampered through it. But today, she was in another mood. She read resentfully.
This casual lovemaking. It was all made to seem too easy. There was a need to be satisfied : that, and no more than that. It did not matter how, or where : if not with one person, then with another. There was no question of choice, scarcely of preference; no sense, certainly, of affinity. Anyone would do.
And it wasn’t as easy as that. If it were, there would be no such thing as tragedy in love, if when you lost one person, there was another waiting, she could let Barclay out of her life with a calm mind, in the sure knowledge that in a week, a month, certainly within a year, she would find someone to take his place.
How simple it would be, if it were like that.
It wasn’t though. In seven years of marriage, in her whole life for that matter, she had met only Barclay: there had been between them an affinity she had found nowhere else, that she could not hope to find again: a strange, electric harmony that you could not explain; that you had to accept as a psychic miracle. She had found it this once only. If she lost Barclay, she would not merely be losing Barclay; she would be losing a whole world of moods and of sensations. It would be gone; in all human probability for ever.
Was it not that that made love, real love, real passion tragic —its endlessly reiterated “last time” feeling; the knowledge that once lost, it was irrecoverable, that if a person wearied of you, you lost not only a person but the passport to an enchanted country.
How empty would be the world that waited her: a narrow world, of narrow interests, of narrow gossip, with Gerald’s health weakening every year, with herself growing older, losing her looks, losing her vitality, with life itself growing narrower, with less money to spend, with the chances of a leave growing more remote. Nothing to look forward to.
If only her child had lived. If she had children to live for, to live in. If there was something to work for, live for. If she had a husband with a career that she could help to build. But there was nothing, nothing … Nothing to look forward to. Grey days followed by black days, and then the end…
Never to love, never to be loved again.
It was that that she could not face. She was not like the people in this book, or rather like the hero of this book. She could not switch from one person to another.
Resentfully, she read on. One girl and then another. Girl after girl alternating with fantastic drinking bouts. How would it end? In death of some kind. Otherwise there would be no meaning to the title. What kind of death? A car crash probably; a drunken drive; an amorous squabble; one hand on the steering wheel, the other pawing at a girl.
She read on quickly, Out of curiosity now, to know the end.
Yes, she had guessed right. The hero left behind, the Press girl coming round for copy, the two of them together. Only ten pages left. That would be it. A sudden skid, the sudden flash of lights.
The girl had turned him down, was going home. Yes But it would be a car smash all the same. He was going round ro the garage. A reckless, solitary drive.
Her eye moved down the page, reading slowly now, pronouncing the actual words, identifying herself with the hero, almost envying him. He had reached his tether, the point where all effort marred the thing it aimed at. The grinding of brakes, the slither of a wheel would be a proper, an appropriate conclusion, would be the equivalent or a happy ending. Another page, another minute or two, and it would be over. He would be out of it, he would have reached Samara.
No, after all, it was not to be like that: not to be a mistake; not to be the intervention of chance. It was to be suicide, a calculated act. Ah, that was fitter. A willed and conscious act; to have chosen his own fate; not to have had a fate forced on him. He had done the thing he wanted, made of his life the thing he wanted.
She pictured him seated in his car, his head heavy with alcohol, his heart heavy with a sense of failure, yet his nerves eased with a sense of certainty. She heard the thudding of the engine; the faint hizz of the exhaust. She could feel drowsiness come over him as drowsiness came over you before a fire. A minute or so and he would be asleep, slumped down there in his seat. His breathing would be loud and stertorous; louder than the engine. For a moment or two, he would sleep unconsciously, for four, for five, for seven minutes maybe … But after those seven minutes … He would be past waking, he would have reached Samara.
She sighed, as she laid down the book with such an envious happiness as young people experience when a novel ends to the sound of wedding-bells. How simple it all was… If one had the courage.
She rose to her feet, crossed the verandah, walked over to the garage, paused before it. How easy it would be. There would be no need here for a hosepipe attached to the exhaust.
The garage had been converted out of a hurricane shelter that Gerald’s grandfather had had built out of cement in a fit of panic after the eruption in Martinique. It had been considered at the time, it was considered still, one of the island’s better jokes. It was high banked, it was impervious to shock; impervious also to ventilation.
There would be no need for a hosepipe here. The door fitted smoothly to the levelled floor. There would be no need even for it to look like suicide.
If Gerald, say, who fell asleep the moment a party ended, were found slumped down there in his seat, would it not be assumed that before he had turned off the engine he had been seized with a choking fit, that in his exhaustion when he had fought his way back to breath, he had lain back against the cushions; that sleep had fallen on him : a sleep that the
fumes had stifled? In his struggle for breath he would never have heard the crash as the door swung to behind him.
She examined the lock. It had not been used for years. One would need a new lock certainly. But would the ordering of a new lock rouse suspicion? Of course it wouldn’t.
If Gerald were found there with the engine running, the garage thick with fumes, the idea of suicide would occur to no one. How easy it would be for Gerald. How easy it would be …
She checked: startled by a sudden thought. Why had not this solution occurred to any one of the tortured characters who had turned to such sorry solutions as arsenic and powdered glass … A running engine, a closed garage door … What chance, what possible chance of detection would there be?
What chance, what possible chance, she thought, as she drove down to Rodney.
For a week now, no rain had fallen. Morning after morning the sun had risen to its apex against a cloudless sky. The grass in the Savane had begun to wither. Unless rain fell in the next few days, the scarlet umbrellas of the immortelles would have shed their blossoms. During the long autumn rains, she had longed for the bright: hot days of early spring, but now that the heat had come, she longed to see a rainbow. That was the trouble about Rodney. There was no variety. It was one thing or the other. Day after day of rain : or day after day of metallic sunlight. No wonder one grew on edge and overwrought. Was it surprising that in such a place one should become the victim of strange phantasies.
Before her eyes rose the picture of a swinging door, her ears caught the sound of a thudding engine. How easy it would be.... How easy.
On the other side of the street, moving towards her at a pace that bore no relation to the climate, came a tall, loose figure. He was smiling happily, swinging a cane. One would have almost thought that he was singing to himself.
“You look pretty pleased with yourself,” she said.
“I’m not pleased with myself. I’m pleased with life.”
