The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories

by Various

  ‘But he liked you in some way you didn’t like? Or is that oversimplifying?’

  Suddenly she gave him a strange look: a kind of lightning assessment of who he was. Then she looked away.

  ‘Could we go and sit down a moment? Under that tree?’ She went on before he could say anything. ‘I’m holding out on you. There’s something I should have told you before. The police. It’s very minor. But it may help explain what I’m trying to say.’

  Again that quickness: a little smile, that stopped him before he could speak.

  ‘Please. Let’s sit down first.’

  She sat cross-legged, like a child. He took a cigarette packet out of his blazer pocket, but she shook her head and he put it away. He sat, then lay on an elbow opposite her. The tired grass. It was totally airless. Just the white dress with the small blue stripes, very simple, a curve off her shoulders down above her breasts, the skin rather pale, faintly olive; those eyes, the line of her black hair. She broke off a stalk of dry grass and fiddled with it in her lap.

  ‘That last meal we had.’ She smiled up. ‘The last supper? Actually I was alone with him for a few minutes before Peter arrived. He’d been at some meeting at the LSE, he was a tiny bit late. Mr Fielding never was. So. He asked me what I’d been doing all week. We’re doing a reprint of some minor late Victorian novels – you know, those campy illustrated ones, it’s just cashing in on a trend – and I explained I’d been reading some.’ She was trying to split the grass-stalk with a nail. ‘It’s just this. I did mention I had to go to the British Museum reading-room the next day to track one down.’ She looked up at the sergeant. ‘Actually in the end I didn’t. But that’s what I told him.’

  He looked down from her eyes. ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’

  ‘I suppose “no one asked me” isn’t good enough?’

  ‘Not from someone of your intelligence.’

  She went back to the grass-stalk. ‘Then sheer cowardice? Plus the knowledge that I’m totally innocent.’

  ‘He didn’t make a thing of it?’

  ‘Not at all. It was just said in passing. I spent most of the time telling him about the book I’d been reading that day. That was all. Then Peter came.’

  ‘And you never went to the Museum?’

  ‘There was a panic over some proofs. I spent the whole of Friday in the office reading them.’ She looked him in the eyes again. ‘You could check. They’d remember the panic.’

  ‘We already have.’

  ‘Thank God for that.’

  ‘Where everybody was that afternoon.’ He sat up and stared away across the grass to Highgate Hill. ‘If you’re innocent, why keep quiet about it?’

  ‘Purely personal reasons.’

  ‘Am I allowed to hear them?’

  ‘Just Peter. It’s actually been rather more off than on for some time now. Since before. The real reason we didn’t go down to Tetbury that weekend was that I refused to.’ She glanced up at the sergeant, as if to see whether she had said enough; then down again into her lap. ‘I felt the only reason he tried to get me down there was to put me in what you just said – the future daughter-in-law situation? Using something he pretends to hate to try and get me. I didn’t like it. That’s all.’

  ‘But you still wanted to protect him?’

  ‘He’s so desperately confused about his father. And I thought, you know… whatever I said, it would seem fishy. And Mrs Fielding. I mean, I know I’m innocent. But I wasn’t sure anyone else would. And I couldn’t see, I still can’t, that it proves anything.’

  ‘If he did go to see you, what could he have wanted?’

  She uncrossed her legs, and sat sideways to him, hands clasped round the knees. ‘I thought at first something to do with me being in publishing. But I’m just a nobody. He knew that.’

  ‘You mean some kind of book? Confession?’

  She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘You should have told us.’

  ‘The other man didn’t explain what he wanted. You have.’

  ‘Thanks. And you’ve still been wicked.’

  ‘Duly contrite.’

  The head was bowed. He pressed a smile out of his mouth.

  ‘This feeling he wanted to tell you something – is that based on this, or something previous?’

  ‘There was one other tiny thing. Down at Tetbury in June. He took me off one day to see some new loose-boxes they’d just had put up. It was really an excuse. To give me a sort of pat on the back. You know. He said something about being glad Peter had hit it off with me. Then that he needed someone with a sense of humour. And then he said: Like all us political animals.’ She spoke the words slowly, as if she were listing them. ‘I’m sure of that. Those words exactly. Then something about, one sometimes forgets there are other ways of seeing life. That was all, but he was sort of trying to let me know he knew he wasn’t perfect. That he knew Tetbury wasn’t my scene. That he didn’t despise my scene as much as I might think.’ She added, ‘I’m talking about tiny, very faint impressions. And retrospective ones. They may not mean anything.’

  ‘Peter obviously didn’t know about the Museum thing?’

  ‘It didn’t come up. Fortunately. Something in him always liked to pretend I didn’t earn my own living.’

  He noted that past tense.

  ‘And he wouldn’t have believed you – if he had known?’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘You wouldn’t be here now, otherwise. Or telling me.’

  ‘No, I suppose I wouldn’t.’

  He leant back again, on an elbow; and tried to calculate how far he could go with personal curiosity under the cover of official duty.

  ‘He sounds very mixed-up. Peter.’

  ‘The opposite really. Unmixed. Like oil and water. Two people.’

  ‘And his father could have been the same?’

  ‘Except it’s naked with Peter. He can’t hide it.’ She was talking with her head bent, rocking a little, hands still clasped around her knees. ‘You know, some people – that kind of pretentious life, houseboys waiting at table and all the rest of it. Okay, one loathes it, but at least it’s natural. Peter’s mother.’ She shrugged. ‘She really believes in the formal hostess bit. Leaving the gentlemen to the port and cigars.’ She glanced sideways at him again. ‘But his father. He so obviously wasn’t a fool. Whatever his political views.’

  ‘He saw through it?’

  ‘But something in him was also too clever to show it. I mean, he never sent it up. Apologized for it, the way some people do. Except for that one thing he said to me. It’s just some kind of discrepancy. I can’t explain.’ She smiled at him. ‘It’s all so tenuous. I don’t even know why I’m bothering to tell you.’

  ‘Probably because you know I’m torn between arresting you for conspiracy to suppress evidence and offering you a cup of tea at Kenwood.’

  She smiled and looked down at her knees, let three or four seconds pass.

  ‘Have you always been a policeman?’

  He told her who his father was.

  ‘And you enjoy it?’

  ‘Being a leper to most of your own generation?’

  ‘Seriously.’

  He shrugged. ‘Not this case. No one wants it solved now. Sleeping dogs and all that. Between ourselves.’

  ‘That must be foul.’

  He smiled. ‘Not until this afternoon, anyway.’ He said quickly. ‘That’s not a pass. You’re just about the first person I’ve seen who makes some kind of sense of it all.’

  ‘And you’re really nowhere nearer… ?’

  ‘Further. But you may have something. There was someone else. Saying more or less what you’ve said. Only not so well.’

  She left another pause.

  ‘I’m sorry I said that thing just now. About police brutality.’

  ‘Forget it. It does happen. Coppers also have small daughters.’

  ‘Do you really feel a leper?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

 
‘Are all your friends in the police?’

  ‘It’s not that. Just the work. Having to come on like authority. Officialdom? Obeying people you don’t always respect. Never quite being your own man.’

  ‘That worries you?’

  ‘When I meet people I like. Who can be themselves.’

  She stared into the distance.

  ‘Would it ever make you give it up?’

  ‘Would what?’

  ‘Not being your own man?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Just…’ she shrugged. ‘That you should use that phrase.’

  ‘Why?’

  She said nothing for a moment, then she looked down at her knees. ‘I do have a private theory. About what happened. It’s very wild.’ She grinned at him. ‘Very literary. If you want to hear it, it will cost you one cup of tea.’ She raised the purse. ‘I didn’t bring any money.’

  He stood and held out a hand. ‘You’re on.’

  They walked towards the trees of Kenwood House. She kept obstinately to her bargain. Her ‘theory’ must wait till they had their tea. So they talked more like the perfect strangers, hazard-met, that they were; about their respective jobs, which required a disillusioning on both sides as to very much of the supposed glamour and excitement attached to them. She admitted, when he revealed that he knew about the children’s stories, to a general literary ambition – that is, a more adult one. She was trying to write a novel, it was so slow, you had to destroy so much and start again; so hard to discover whether one was really a writer or just a victim of a literary home environment. He felt a little bit the same about his own work; and its frustrations and endless weeks of getting nowhere. They rather surprisingly found, behind the different cultural backgrounds, a certain kind of unspoken identity of situation. He queued up behind his witness at the tea-counter, observing the back of her head, that tender skin above the curve of the dress, the starchy blue stripes in its mealy whiteness; and he knew he had to see her again, off-duty. He had no problems with girls. It was not a physical thing, a lack of confidence sexually; not even a class or a cultural thing; but a psychological thing, a knowledge that he was – despite the gaffe, but even the gaffe had been a kind of honesty – dealing with a quicker and more fastidious mind in the field of emotions and personal relationships… that, and the traditional ineligibility of his kind for her kind, with the added new political bar, if the intelligence was also progressive, that he had referred to as a leprosy. Something about her possessed something that he lacked: a potential that lay like unsown ground, waiting for just this unlikely corn-goddess; a direction he could follow, if she would only show it. An honesty, in one word. He had not wanted a girl so fast and so intensely for a long time. Nevertheless, he made a wise decision.

  They found a table to themselves in a corner. This time she accepted a cigarette.

  ‘So let’s have it.’

  ‘Nothing is real. All is fiction.’

  She bit her lips, lips without make-up, waiting for his reaction.

  ‘That solves the case?’

  ‘Lateral thinking. Let’s pretend everything to do with the Fieldings, even you and me sitting here now, is in a novel. A detective story. Yes? Somewhere there’s someone writing us, we’re not real. He or she decides who we are, what we do, all about us.’ She played with her teaspoon; the amused dark eyes glanced up at him. ‘Are you with me?’

  ‘By the skin of my teeth.’

  ‘A story has to have an ending. You can’t have a mystery without a solution. If you’re the writer you have to think of something.’

  ‘I’ve spent most of this last month –’

  ‘Yes, but only in reality. It’s the difference between I haven’t many facts, so I can’t decide anything – and I haven’t many facts, but I’ve simply got to decide something.’

  He felt a little redressment of the imbalance – after all a fault in this girl, a cerebral stillness. It would have irritated him in someone less attractive in other ways; now it simply relieved him. He smiled.

  ‘We play that game too. But never mind.’

  She bit her lips again. ‘I propose to dismiss the deus ex machina possibility. It’s not good art. An awful cheat, really.’

  ‘You’d better…’

  She grinned. ‘The god out of the machine. Greek tragedy. When you couldn’t work out a logical end from the human premises, you dragged in something external. You had the villain struck down by lightning. A chimney-pot fell on his head. You know?’

  ‘I’m back on my feet.’

  ‘Of course the British Museum thing may have been pure coincidence. On the other hand the vanished man might have been really determined to see that girl. So I think the writer would make him – when he found she wasn’t in the reading-room after all – telephone the publishers where she works. There’s a blank in her day. Between just after half-past five, when she left work, until about eight, when she met Peter Fielding to go to a rather ghastly party.’

  And suddenly he felt more seriously out of his depth. He was being teased – which meant she liked him? Or he was being officially mocked – which meant she didn’t?

  ‘They met then?’

  She raised a finger.

  ‘The writer could have made them meet. He’d have to make it a kind of spur-of-the-moment thing. Obviously it could have been much better planned, if the missing man had had it in mind for some time. He’d have to say something like… I’ve just broken under all the hidden pressures of my life, I don’t know who to turn to, you seem quite a sympathetic and level-headed girl, you –’

  ‘This level-headed girl would be telling me all this?’

  ‘Only if she was quite sure it couldn’t be proved. Which she might be. Given that at this late date the police have apparently never even suspected such a meeting.’

  ‘Correction. Found evidence of.’

  ‘Same thing.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘So he might just have made her pity him? This seeming hollow man pouring out all his despair. A hopelessness. Terribly difficult to write, but it could be done. Because it so happens the girl is rather proud of her independence. And her ability to judge people. And don’t forget she really hasn’t any time at all for the world he’s running away from.’ The real girl played with her plastic teaspoon, looked up at him unsmiling now; trying him out. ‘And there’s no sex angle. She’d be doing it out of the kindness of her heart. And not very much. Just fixing up somewhere for him to hide for a few days, until he can make his own arrangements. And being the kind of person she is, once she’d decided it was the right thing to do, nothing, not even rather dishy young policemen who buy her cups of tea, would ever get the facts out of her.’

  He stared at his own cup and saucer. ‘You’re not by any chance… ?’

  ‘Just one way the writer might have played it.’

  ‘Hiding people isn’t all that easy.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Especially when they’ve acted on the spur of the moment and made no financial arrangements that one can discover. And when they’re not spur-of-the-moment people.’

  ‘Very true.’

  ‘Besides, it’s not how I read her character.’

  ‘More conventional?’

  ‘More imaginative.’

  She leant away on an elbow, smiling.

  ‘So our writer would have to tear this ending up?’

  ‘If he’s got a better.’

  ‘He has. And may I have another cigarette?’

  He lit it for her. She perched her chin on her hands, leant forward.

  ‘What do you think would strike the writer about his story to date – if he re-read it?’

  ‘He ought never to have started it in the first place.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Forgot to plant any decent leads.’

  ‘Doesn’t that suggest something about the central character? You know, in books, they do have a sort of life of their own.’

  ‘He didn’t me
an evidence to be found?’

  ‘I think the writer would have to face up to that. His main character has walked out on him. So all he’s left with is the character’s determination to have it that way. High and dry. Without a decent ending.’

  The sergeant smiled down. ‘Except writers can write it any way they like.’

  ‘You mean detective stories have to end with everything explained? Part of the rules?’

  ‘The unreality.’

  ‘Then if our story disobeys the unreal literary rules, that might mean it’s actually truer to life?’ She bit her lips again. ‘Leaving aside the fact that it has all happened. So it must be true, anyway.’

  ‘I’d almost forgotten that.’

  She set out her saucer as an ashtray.

  ‘So all our writer could really do is find a convincing reason why this main character had forced him to commit the terrible literary crime of not sticking to the rules?’ She said, ‘Poor man.’

  The sergeant felt the abyss between them; people who live by ideas, people who have to live by facts. He felt obscurely humiliated, to have to sit here and listen to all this; and at the same time saw her naked, deliciously naked on his bed. Her bed. Any bed or no bed. The nipples showed through the thin fabric; the hands were so small, the eyes so alive.

  ‘And you happen to have it?’

  ‘There was an author in his life. In a way. Not a man. A system, a view of things? Something that had written him. Had really made him just a character in a book.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Someone who never put a foot wrong. Always said the right thing, wore the right clothes, had the right image. Right with a big r, too. All the roles he had to play. In the City. The country. The dull and dutiful member of parliament. So in the end there’s no freedom left. Nothing he can choose. Only what the system says.’

  ‘But that goes for –’

  ‘Then one has to look for something very unusual in him. Since he’s done something very unusual?’ The sergeant nodded. She was avoiding his eyes now. ‘All this dawns on him. Probably not suddenly. Slowly. Little by little. He’s like something written by someone else, a character in fiction. Everything is planned. Mapped out. He’s like a fossil – while he’s still alive. One doesn’t have to suppose changes of view. Being persuaded by Peter politically. Seeing the City for the nasty little rich man’s casino it really is. He’d have blamed everything equally. How it had used him. Limited him. Prevented him.’