by Gee, Maurice
‘Doctor and police?’ Eric said after a while.
‘What’s the hurry? Can’t bring her back,’ Ferrabee said.
He took a tray of tea to the study, then went out to the garage to change his clothes.
‘You’d better get something dry on, Eric,’ I said.
‘I’ve been wet so often lately I don’t see the point.’ He found another pot and made tea, swallowed it. ‘Do you think she walked in or fell?’
‘Fell,’ I said.
‘Not Ferrabee?’
‘No. Good God, no. Why would he?’
‘All right,’ he said.
I’ve looked at it so many ways — that James had seen her go and turned his back; that terror overcame her in the house that moved, where her life had turned her from the happy girl, triumphant bride, into the faded woman, querulous and afraid, of her last days, turned her about, and so she had fled into the storm and found the boiling stream and killed herself — but I prefer to think now that she simply had no will to stay alive. She left the house where her life had already ended and was lashed by wind and rain outside the door; walked barefooted in strange elements; came to the stream and did not understand; perhaps even tried to walk across, it was so different from anything she had known. When the water got too strong she let it rush her down, and when she reached the iron grille and found herself trapped there, had no thought of living or dying but only of waiting for what came next — if she had any thought at all.
It’s something more than a game I play; I’m half convinced.
Another possibility: when James tucked her in, his tenderness unhinged her.
Eric said, ‘We’d better see James.’
He was lighting a fire in the study and frowned when we came in.
‘We’re going to have to let someone know,’ Eric said.
‘I’ve tried the phone. It’s still dead. Perhaps you could ask Ferrabee to fetch the doctor?’
‘He’ll have to bring the police as well. James, we want to say how sorry —’
‘She had a disappointing life,’ he said. ‘I tried my best but there was no making her happy. Heaven knows —’ he looked at us suddenly, penetrating — ‘I racked my brains. You all saw that. She was no help in my career. Nevertheless …’
He seemed on the point of expressing pity but turned to the fire instead and puffed air from the bellows on to the kindling sticks.
‘How are the women taking it?’
‘We’ll go and see. James you can come and stay with us for a while.’
‘Whatever for? Charlotte will be here. That’s all I need. There’ll be lots of fuss, I suppose. Is there no way of keeping the police out?’
‘James …’
‘Yes, I see. It’s a death, after all. In unusual circumstances. Perhaps Ferrabee could go for them.’
I found him in the kitchen. Eric shifted his car to let him out, and he drove away. We went upstairs and tapped on Violet’s door. Rose came out.
‘We thought we should try something, but she was so cold,’ she said.
‘I think she’d been in there for hours,’ Eric said. ‘How —’ He was going to ask about Charlie but said instead, ‘How are you all?’
‘I don’t know. How are we? She’s my sister, Eric.’
I held her as she cried … and I won’t go on with this; with doctor and police and the women. With Violet’s funeral, which was private. All of it is private, how we passed those days.
Charlie said, ‘I can’t leave Da alone.’ She went back home with him. James had not invited us for any sort of gathering or wake — for anything post-Violet. We went to our own homes and closed the doors behind us.
When the stream went down Ferrabee found Violet’s nightie tangled in the broken branches at the grille.
Chapter Eight
Forbes and Coates were back from London where they had attended the King’s Silver Jubilee. Forbes had not announced an election date, although the Coalition’s four-year term was up in December. He had grabbed an extra year in 1934, using the collapsed economy as an excuse, but would not be able to do it a second time.
Eric and I ran into Oliver Joll at a rugby match and put the question to him: when would it be?
‘Gentlemen, if I knew …’ He spread his hands, then laughed and apologised. ‘I’m not pretending, Sam. I’m learning about life as the new boy. Nobody tells me.’
‘I warned you.’
‘Patience is the thing. I don’t mind as long as I can help beat these blighters.’ He meant Labour. ‘Well, I’m off. It’s a pretty poor game. Oh, butterfingers, keep your eye on the ball. He’s a ninny, that boy. Goodbye, Sam. Goodbye, Professor.’ Off he went in his cashmere overcoat and brown Homburg hat — a bit of a dandy, Oliver Joll. Then he was back. ‘I was so sorry, it knocked me sideways — Mrs Tinling. A terrible thing. I wrote James a letter. Terrible thing. And of course, she was your sister-in-law. My sympathies.’ It seemed straight shooting, not politics. He strode away.
The player he had called a ninny was our nephew, Taylor Barr. He played on the wing for College Old Boys and scored a try shortly after Ollie Joll left — not a good try, all he had to do was fall on the ball. I spotted Owen Moody in a seat further down the stand, pointed him out to Eric and we went down.
‘Muddied oafs,’ Owen said. ‘Can you see the attraction? You’d think the ball had a personality. They’re loving it one minute and kicking it the next.’
I asked him why he hadn’t been in touch. I needed to talk about our novel and sort out where it was going and how to bring it there.
‘Who’s left in?’
‘You and me. Theo Mead. Four or five others. Euan Poynter is out.’
‘So am I,’ Eric said. ‘You can keep my bit about the poison, that’s all. I think your man with the scar would be a poisoner.’
I saw a blue intemperance, flash of anger, in Owen’s eyes. ‘I don’t know about that.’
‘We can’t talk about it here. Can you come and see me, Owen?’
‘Yes, well. Not next week. Maybe after that. I’ll drop you a note.’
‘Oh, that hurt,’ Eric said. Taylor lay writhing on the ground.
‘He’ll get no sympathy from me,’ Owen said.
‘He’s putting it on,’ I said.
‘Of course he is. There’s the whistle. Now he has to wash off all his mud. Thank God for cricket.’
Eric dropped me at my gate, where I met Frank Siers coming out.
‘I’ve been delivering Mrs Holloway’s painting,’ he said. ‘And asking about poor Charlotte. What a sad thing. Is she all right? Mrs Holloway didn’t seem at all sure.’
Her mother’s dead, of course she’s not all right, I wanted to say. ‘Ninny’ seemed a fitter word for Siers than for Taylor Barr. He quivered away.
Rose had hung the painting in the room where she did her sewing. ‘It’s out of your way here,’ she said.
She had overlooked — or perhaps she hadn’t — that I was in and out all the time and would see it baring its moony flesh at me ten times a day.
‘I asked Charlotte to come across and see it. She’s going to ride her bicycle in tomorrow.’
‘All that way?’
‘She’s a big strong girl. It’s not her I’m worried about. I know she feels she should have helped Vi more. Stayed at home instead of traipsing around doing sketches. Mr Siers rang her and all she could do was cry. I think it’s just a scouring out. She’ll be all right. But James …’ His coldness, self-absorption, were a mortal disease. ‘They were married forty years and it’s as if he’s said goodbye to some visitor at the gate.’
Rose looked at Charlie’s painting and I wondered what that naked figure would come to mean. If you turned her round, would she wear Vi’s face?
The rain began again next morning, spoiling Charlie’s plan to cycle in from the Hutt. She walked to Melling station and caught a train. At half past ten she stood cold and dripping at our door. Rose dried her and gave her clothes. They talked in the sewing
room for an hour — too long to spend admiring a painting. It was Charlie’s dilemma detaining them: she could not leave her father, but must if she was to have a life of her own.
Duty holds one in a vise. But how the argument widens out. Any worthwhile dictionary identifies half a dozen kinds. What did Charlie owe James? Obedience and submission, he would have said. He would have her ‘duteous’. She, I’m sure, when all the pain of neglect was taken away, still wanted — needed — to love him.
Charlie stays; she cannot go until there occurs some further act, whether of love or something else, that she must make and he accept, or he must make to dismiss and free her: so I concluded on that morning in my study, while she and Rose talked in the sewing room — then chattered in there, laughed in there.
I gave away my analysis — had meant to see if I might somehow raise the matter at lunch. Instead I talked crossly about modern art, saying that Stanley Spencer mutilated the human form, creating no more than a human burlesque, and the Royal Academy had been perfectly right to reject his paintings; which Charlie bridled at and we had a set-to. Rose finished it by telling me to take my sore head away from the table. I sat in my study and grew contrite: what a time to bully the girl, with her mother scarcely two weeks dead.
The rain eased to a drizzle. We took umbrellas and walked up the hill to visit May and Eric. He and I grew careless of our differences and fell into a quarrel about poetry, I quoting with distaste: ‘the sparrows in the gutters’ — ‘You cannot,’ I cried, ‘you cannot use gutters in poetry’ — and ‘smell of steak in passageways’ and ‘yellow soles of feet’.
‘He’s got some malady,’ I said, ‘some pathological twisting in his bowels. It’s little,’ I said, ‘it’s unlovely, and worst of all it’s unmusical. Don’t they have ears, don’t they have eyes? And isn’t there one, just one, happy man amongst them? Now listen. Listen to this:
‘ “Read from some humble poet,
Whose songs gushed from his heart —” ’
Eric interrupted:
‘ “And the cares that infest the day
Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.”
‘That’s very nice, but isn’t it yesterday’s language, Sam?’
‘It’s not, it’s eternal.’ I wouldn’t be stopped. Recited:
‘ “When all the world is young, lad,
And all the trees are green …” (Charles Kingsley) and:
‘ “Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in …” ’ (Leigh Hunt).
‘There’s a sensualist inside you, Sam, elbowing to get out.’ He almost never resorted to sneering. (The women, like Arabs, had silently stolen away.)
Suddenly calm, I said, ‘That’s unworthy, Eric. That’s not like you.’
‘No, I’m sorry. Care for a walk? I need some air.’
We climbed the hill, sharing an umbrella.
‘I’ve done something stupid. I’m in trouble,’ he said. ‘I would have mentioned it yesterday but I needed to talk to May.’
I felt, simultaneously, elation and dread. Eric had confided in me but never confessed before.
‘I went to visit Lily Maxey on Friday night. Just for a yack, that’s all we do. We were talking about that Clara Butt concert and she asked me if I’d like to go next door. They were having a musical evening — it’s true, Sam, they were. Lily plays the piano really well and one of the girls takes singing lessons in the day. She’s got a voice a bit like Jenny Lind, very pure. So I went. It was foolish, I know. But I’ve told May. She understands.’
‘What happened?’
‘It’s not really a brothel, not like one. Although the girls weren’t wearing very much. But Lily played the piano and Susan, that’s the singing girl, she sang. We played some records and one or two people danced. Then I sang — you know how I like to when I get the chance. “Drink to me only”, I sang that. A bad choice, really. It’s better for a tenor than a baritone. But in the middle of it the police raided the place.’
The rain had stopped. I made a business of shaking and folding my umbrella. I doubted Eric. I doubted he was telling the whole truth. Gutters, I thought, yellow soles. We seemed, on top of our hill, like two wrinkled dwarves in baggy clothes.
‘It’s lucky you were singing,’ I said.
‘I meant to leave sooner. I was leaving. But you know how I am — one last song, when people ask.’
‘Did they arrest you?’
‘No, they don’t do that, not with the men. They took our names. There were officers from a liner in port. And one or two others.’
‘Who?’
‘I can’t tell you names. No one you’re friends with.’
‘Except you. Who did they arrest?’
‘Lily and three of the girls. One of them had her husband there. They let her go.’
‘It is a brothel though, isn’t it? That’s what it’s for?’
‘Yes, but it wasn’t in use. I swear that, Sam. It might have been later — it would have been. But no one used the bedrooms when I was there. The police looked in — no one there. They weren’t too pleased. There were five of them, a sergeant and four constables. They must have heard me singing. If they’d waited till I’d gone … I was all set to leave.’
‘Was Mrs Maxey leaving?’
‘Yes, she would have, back next door. She doesn’t go in when they don’t need her.’
‘That’s why they raided, then. They wanted to get the owner. The girls are prostitutes, aren’t they?’
Eric sighed. He turned away. ‘Yes, they are.’ We stood in silence, yellow dwarves. ‘But they’re pleasant girls. Nothing common. One of them used to be a teacher. Kindergarten, she says. And one of them sings.’
‘As well as that they have sex for money. And Mrs Maxey gets her share. I suppose she’s rich?’
‘Not as much as some of the crooked businessmen in town, friends of yours. So don’t get moral. I was there to visit Lily, and later on for the music and maybe a dance. I think I danced. Yes, once. I like it, all right? But I didn’t do a single thing … You don’t believe me.’
‘Yes, I do.’ I believed him. ‘Does May?’
He nodded. ‘She’s furious. Did you see?’
‘I thought she was just out of sorts.’
‘At least she knows I didn’t misbehave. I told you, Sam, May and I … The trouble is, I just do damn fool things.’
‘I imagine she’s jealous of Mrs Maxey.’
‘No, she’s not.’
‘I mean because you talk to her.’
‘I talk to May. You’ve heard how we talk. How we trust each other.’
It was not enough. He must flirt with carnality and abasement. He must go close and open his nostrils to the smell. It was part of his largeness, he might say; and I would say it wasted and reduced him.
‘So,’ I said, after a while, ‘what happens now?’
‘They’ll be in court tomorrow. Magistrates Court.’
‘Charged with what?’
‘Keeping a house of ill fame, I suppose. That’s Lily. The others — I don’t know. Working there. I don’t know what they call it. She’s got a lawyer. He says she’ll get bail, so that’s all right. The thing is, he wants to call some of the men.’
‘Mightn’t the prosecution want them too?’
‘Wybrow, he’s her lawyer, doesn’t think so. A couple of them are stuffed-shirt boys.’ He gave an angry laugh. ‘They’ve got their businesses to attend to.’
‘So if Wybrow calls you … ?’
Eric looked at me over his glasses. ‘I’ve known Lily for a long time, Sam.’
I nodded. He would stand up in court and testify that his brothel-keeping friend had played the piano and he had sung Ben Jonson’s song. That was where his stupidity led. If they asked him what the house was used for when the singing stopped, what would he say?
‘It’s touch and go. Wybrow thinks the police might have to drop their charges.’
/> ‘Meanwhile you get tarred with a dirty brush.’
‘That doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. May knows what I am. You know what I am.’ He peered at me and I turned away. I did not know. He had been firm under my feet, then less firm as our sad and ugly year went on, and now honest affections were all he had left. They gave him little weight.
I’m mixing my metaphors. Journalists should avoid them — although I’m more than a journalist now. It seems I’m that novelist I wanted to make a twelfth part of. Novelists can use metaphors, and beat them together like butter and eggs if they choose.
Where was I? Nowhere, that’s the truth. The rain started again. I put up my umbrella and shared it with Eric, although I did not want his shoulder rubbing mine. Back at the house, he offered to drive Charlie home. Rose and I walked down the hill to Hobson Street. May had not told her of Eric’s evening out. I did not tell her either: the time would come.
I apologised for my nasty temper that day.
I did not go to court, and would have wasted my time if I had, for the magistrate cleared it because of ‘the very many unsavoury details in the case’. He allowed representatives of the Society for the Protection of Women and Children to stay.
I’ll have done with it, although it dragged on for two days. Eric was not called to testify. The magistrate dismissed the charges for lack of evidence. A triumph for the lawyers and a defeat for the rule of law. The only good thing to come out of it was that Mrs Maxey closed the ‘house’ part of her house. She put the whole property on the market.
Enough of her. She’ll come back when it’s time.
The public felt cheated, or so my friends in the newspaper business claimed. It’s closer to the truth to say they felt cheated. Only Truth followed up the story — hints and insinuations and moral outrage, with the hypocrisy that makes me ashamed of my calling sometimes. It wasn’t for long. Another, and greater, sensation soon turned up.
Why am I being cryptic? It’s writing cheques when you’ve got no money in the bank. That’s what I learn as I sit scribbling here.
Out in the open then, laying it down flat: on Friday of that week I called in to pass the time with friends in the reporters’ room at the Dominion. Alan Gooch, who did arts and entertainments, called me over.
