by John Bowen
CHAPTER FOUR
Interlude
The ashes of our fire still lay in the hearth at Chew Magna. We came into the house feeling like uninvited guests. Our footsteps seemed unnaturally loud on the bare boards of the music-room, now bereft of its piano.
Sonya raked out the hearth, while I chopped up a chest of drawers to make a fire. The drawers had been lined with newspaper, and the columns of print told of an old happy time before the Flood. They told of the tantrums of statesmen and Trade Union leaders and of the divorces of film stars. They told of hydrogen bomb tests, and of geneticists who protested against the increase of radioactivity in the atmosphere, and of Cabinet Ministers who accused the geneticists of communist sympathies. We read of the dangers of Britain’s becoming a second-class power, of inconvenient documents suppressed, foreigners of liberal sympathies deported, private citizens dismissed from their jobs for reasons of security which they were not permitted to answer, and of Her Majesty’s Home Secretary, who had remarked while opening a Charity Bazaar at Hendon, that he could not doubt that Great Britain, in these troubled times, was an example of enlightened democracy that the world would do well to copy.
We watched the flames burn away the headlines, and catch the varnish and wood of the chest of drawers. “It’s a lovely fire,” Sonya said. “There’s no sense in sitting around in wet clothes, though. We’d better find something to change into. I’ll go and look.” Watching her as she left the room, watching her straight-backed graceful walk, I thought that, almost alone among artists, dancers look like what they are. Classical dancers practise a formal art, and wear their similarity of limb and feature like a badge. Sonya has dark hair, parted in the middle, lying close to her head; it is the hair you have seen so many times, framing the too-white faces of the corps in Les Sylphides; now that Sonya’s hair has been often dirtied and often washed, and unskilfully hacked about as it has grown, it is not easy to control, but she still insists in confining it in the same unbecoming chignon. Sonya’s eyes are dark, beneath eyebrows arched into a gentle V; her legs are slim; she has neat dancer’s breasts; her back is straight. In time, she will grow old, she will bear children, and she will become (though neither of us will ever notice it) an old dancer, bright-eyed, and dedicated, chirping her commands in bastard French to a new generation at some improvised barre—even if it is no more than she has as I write this story, a rough fence and a levelled patch of ground, where even now she scuffs her toes in the dusty earth.
But I did not look so far into the future at Chew; my thoughts were not so ordered. When Sonya returned, she was carrying a huge armful of clothing and two towels. She threw the clothing in a pile on the floor, and handed me one of the towels. “Let’s get dried before we put our things on,” she said. “You dry me, and I’ll dry you.”
It was not at all as it had been with Wendy; we were not brother and sister at all. My mouth was dry, and I knew that my ears were red. I found that the casual affairs of the newspaper and advertising worlds had not prepared me for this; I was for the first time in love and embarrassed. I turned my back on Sonya as I undressed, tearing off my shirt and vest in one movement, but (since my fingers shook so) taking an age to untie the laces of my shoes.
I turned round, and Sonya was naked already. The male body is not constituted to conceal desire. Sonya did not pretend to be surprised; she was not off-hand and sophisticated either; simply, she lifted her face to be kissed. Then, after that first long searching kiss, she was very close to me, her head on my shoulder.
We sat down together awkwardly on to the pile of clothing. I and “Darling … darling….” over and over again, and Sonya moaned a little as she closed her eyes.
After a long while she said, “I think you’d better get some wood. The fire’s almost out.”
CHAPTER FIVE
A Life Afloat
Sonya was singing when we saw the raft. “Cruising down the river, On a Sunday afternoon, The sun above and one you love, Waiting for the moon”—however things went with us, I found, she had this simple absorption in whatever she happened to be doing at the moment. I cannot remember how many days we had spent in the dinghy now that land shelters had become dangerous. To anyone still tied to the land, we offered the possibility of escape and food, even though we had no food and no destination. My arm was gashed from one such encounter with an old wild verger, alone on a church tower.
We were, in any case, out of sight of land. We could no longer tell whether all had been submerged by the steadily rising water, or whether we had drifted into the Bristol Channel and so the sea; there seemed to be very little swell, but the water had a slightly salty taste, and we used the rain-water for drinking—“What we drink at least we don’t have to bail out,” Sonya had said. Both of us felt irresponsible from hunger; we had eaten nothing for some days. A man has a duty to try to live, so we bailed out the dinghy from time to time, and the useless, baitless line trailed behind us, but neither of us imagined that we should survive our voyage together.
Then we saw the raft. It was very large, and very square, and it had a sort of square outhouse set in the middle of it. There was a mast for a sail, which hung down limply, to be soaked by the thin rain. The raft rose, it seemed to us, curiously high in the water.
I said, “Shall we hail them?”
“What can we lose?”
I made a megaphone of my hands, and shouted into the rain, “Ahoy! Is anyone there?” After a moment, a door in the square outhouse opened, and a figure in yellow oilskins appeared, looked at the dinghy, and went away again.
“What’s the use?” I said.
“Paddle closer.”
As we drew closer to the raft, the man reappeared, accompanied by a second larger man, who was carrying what seemed to be a spear. The yellow oilskins were far too large for the smaller man, and far too yellow for anyone. “Ahoy there!” I shouted again.
“Stay where you are,” said the smaller man. “If you come any closer, I shall ask Captain Hunter to jab you with his spear.”
We paddled closer still, keeping just out of range. “We’ve warned you,” the man said. “You have only yourselves to blame. Even if you were to succeed in boarding this raft, there are enough of us to do the two of you considerable harm before flinging you back in the water.”
I said, “I’m sorry. We thought——”
“You’ll have to answer some questions first. Who are you? Are you husband and wife?”
I said, “No,” and Sonya said, “Yes.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” said the man. “Circumstances have forced most of us into adopting a new view of social relationships. How old is the woman?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Is she healthy?”
“I’m a bit damp,” said Sonya.
“So I see. I suppose we could take the woman anyway. What do you do?”
“Do?”
“For a living.”
I had a sudden moment of inspiration. “I’m a cook,” I said.
“A cook!” The other man had not spoken until now. He was a big, blond-bearded, silly-looking fellow. He grounded his spear, and looked at me hopefully. “Can you cook fish?” he said.
“I can cook anything.”
The smaller man said suspiciously, “You have a very educated voice—for a cook.”
“I worked for five years at the École Gastronomique in Paris. My uncle was Gaston Dufresne.” I hoped very much that there was an École Gastronomique in Paris. They would certainly have heard of Gaston Dufresne, who had been invented by my advertising agency to popularize a meat extract.
“I say,” said the blond man. “Must be all right then.”
“There is nothing to be lost by trying him,” said the smaller man. “He may be able to devise a dish that incorporates your breakfast food, Captain Hunter.”
“Oh, I say.”
“Please allow them to board at any rate. When they have unloaded their dinghy, they may as well secure it to the raft, if
there is any hook or bolt that may be adapted to the purpose.”
“There’s a sort of ring thing,” said Hunter.
“By all means let them use the ring thing,” said the smaller man.
*
“Why did you tell them that?” said Sonya.
“I had to tell them something.”
“But why——?”
“Be quiet; they may hear you. It was obvious that they wouldn’t take me on board unless I could do something useful.”
“Can you cook?”
“Not very well. You’ll have to help.”
Sonya was silent as I completed the series of knots that secured the dinghy to Captain Hunter’s ring thing. “They didn’t ask me….” she said slowly.
“No.”
“Then?”
“No,” I said. “Don’t worry. We’ll think of something. We’ll stay together. I’ll be near you all the time. It’ll be all right.”
But when we came to climb on to the raft from the dinghy, which lay lower in the water, we found that we had even less strength than we had thought, and I could not believe that, if the need came, I should make a very effective bodyguard.
*
The smaller man was Arthur Renshaw. He was an accountant. Someone (I think it was P. G. Wodehouse) once wrote of a character, “Behind his spectacles, his eyes gleamed with the light of pure intelligence”. Arthur was like that—absurd and frightening. He had thin lips, and a thin face, and thin hair, lying flat against his head. He had high cheek-bones, and hair grew on them. He was in practical command of the raft, although his arrival on board had been as fortuitous as our own.
The raft belonged to the International Unitarian Breakfast Food Company. It was made of balsa wood, and liberally stocked with Glub, the Ideal Breakfast Food: You Need No Other. It had been the contention of the International Unitarian Breakfast Food Company that man could live by Glub alone. As the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans began to fill up between 1955 and 1960 with balsa-wood rafts, criss-crossing in contrary directions to reach different anthropological and oceanographical conclusions, the Company had outfitted a raft of its own, and commissioned Captain Hunter to command it. He was to sail around the world on it; Glub was to be his food, and distilled sea-water his drink. Glub contains every known vitamin, as well as protein, carbo-hydrates and all the elements needed to sustain life. Glub comes in any shape—Glub Grits, Glub Cushions, Glub Toasties, Glub Flakes, Poppity Glub for the Little Ones, Glub Mash, and of course the new Glub in a Matchbox—A Week’s Nourishment in Your Pants’ Pocket. Glub is protein and has many uses; it can be eaten for breakfast with hot or cold milk or with fruit, for lunch with cheese or for dinner with meat, or even instead of meat (Glub Cutlets for vegetarians); moistened and moulded, Hunter had discovered, it is an excellent bait for fish if the fish are hungry.
I remembered the photographs and publicity when Hunter set off. But there was so much of that sort of thing then; it sometimes seemed that hardly a day passed without a group of students setting out for Australia in a ketch. It had all been some time ago, and quickly forgotten; it had occurred to nobody to find out how Hunter was getting on. After all, the voyage was bound to take some time; it had taken Sir Francis Drake three years in a much faster vessel.
Hunter had drifted with many currents, sailed before many winds. His distaste for Glub had made of him a skilful fisherman with spear and line. Landing once on an uninhabited island, he had discovered the joy of coconuts and goats which ran wild, but his sense of duty to his employers drove him on: “Besides,” he said, “I was due the whale of a lot of back pay.” He got lost. He had never been much good at navigation (“used to leave that kind of thing to the N.C.O.’s”) and by the end of the first year he had ceased to have much idea where he was, since in any case there was so little he could do about controlling the direction in which his craft travelled—you can run before the wind in a raft after you have used your rudder to manœuvre you into the right position, but you cannot sail into it. At some time during his voyage, the rain had begun, and had not stopped, but it had not occurred to him to think this odd.
I once asked him how he had come to apply for the job.
“Read a book about it,” he said, “I mean, I had to do something. I tried out for keeping a pub, as a matter of fact, but they wouldn’t have me. Something to do with I.Q.: you had to do mental arithmetic, and underline words and all that stuff. Then a pal of mine told me about this job; said they were looking for an open-air type. I must say it sounded very jolly. You know—shirt-off stuff and all that.”
He was a shirt-off kind of man, never so happy as when he was stripped to the waist and growing a beard. He should have stayed in the army, but they got, he said, so bloody technical. Besides, he had no real talent for command, not even for the pretence of it; his N.C.O.’ s must have bullied him atrociously. On the other hand, he was very good at taking orders. He would certainly have jabbed away at us with that spear if Arthur had told him to do so, although he was not an unkind man, and I never saw him lose his temper.
*
Muriel and Wesley Otterdale were the next we met of the raft’s complement. We found them in the galley, where Muriel was trying to make a stew of fish-heads.
The galley was only one room of the four which made up the living quarters of the raft. They had been fitted up by the International Unitarian Breakfast Food Company like a bachelor flat in Knightsbridge; there was a living-room, a bedroom, a kitchen and a bathroom (with salt-water shower). The lights and the stove were worked by electricity, which was made on board the raft itself. Small wheels of some very light metal (was it lithium, or is that one of the metals which explodes in water?) were mounted just below the waterline. Each was curiously indented with cup-shaped veins, and as the raft moved in the water, these wheels revolved, charging the storage batteries by which the raft was powered. Their capacity was enormous; although the raft had been frequently becalmed during the last few months by the heavy rain, the supply of electrical power had been easily maintained.
All the floor of the raft was hollow, and formed an immense hold. In it were barrels and crates of Glub in its various forms, a spare sail, tools—all that. Hunter must have lived very comfortably when he was on the raft alone, and even as things were, we found ourselves inconceivably better off than we had been in the Camp. The men slept in the living-room, the women in the bedroom, Muriel Otterdale told us. Fishing and cooking duties had been organized on a roster, and those people not so engaged were put by Arthur to some useful task. There were always things to be done.
“What sort of things?” I said.
“Making nets. Stuffing the cracks in the barrels with string.”
“Caulking,” said Wesley. It was the first time he had spoken. “It makes the toilet smell of glue.”
“You mustn’t be despondant, dear.”
“Don’t go on at me, Muriel,” said Wesley. “I get enough of that from the parson.”
“I’ m sorry, dear.”
“What parson?” I said.
“Mr. Banner. He’s always telling my husband not to worry about things.”
“He makes me tired,” said Wesley.
Sonya said, “I don’t see why you shouldn’t worry if you want to.”
“No more do I,” said Wesley. “No more do I. When a man’s soul is troubled like mine is, I don’t see why he shouldn’t worry a little. Worry!—” he took the wooden spoon from the stew he was stirring, and gazed at us; his eyes were large and sad, and the line of his moustache looked unnaturally black against the pallor of his face. “I can’t sleep. I lie awake there, worrying and worrying.”
“I wish you could do something about it,” Muriel said, “speak to Arthur or something. We’re not used to sleeping apart, you see; we never have, right from the first, never twin beds or anything like that. Being married yourselves, you’d understand. We wouldn’t mind sleeping in the kitchen, if we could be together. But Arthur won’t see it like that. He’s so order
ly.”
“What do you worry about, Mr. Otterdale?” I said.
“Guilt.”
“It’s all nonsense,” Muriel said, “Mr. Banner keeps telling him, but he won’t take any notice. It wasn’t his fault anyway, even if God was likely to be so vindictive.”
“Guilt!” said Wesley again. “Guilt and silliness! The Lord thy God is a jealous God. He will not suffer guilt and silliness to go unpunished.”
“It was the police wouldn’t believe him, and quite right too.”
I said, “But what did you do?”
“I murdered my wife’s mother.”
“Goodness!” said Sonya. “Why didn’t they hang you for it?”
“They wouldn’t. The fools! I told them and told them, and they did nothing about it whatever. Would you believe,” he said, “I asked to be punished. God knows I was willing.”
“It’s all nonsense really,” said Muriel confidentially. “He never even hit her.”
“I killed the old woman as surely as if I had cut her into little pieces before your eyes. I’m guilty, and I should be punished; that’s all there is to it.”
It was a silly story. Muriel’s mother had lived with them ever since they had married. She seems to have been a particularly malicious old lady, and she had never approved of Wesley. For so long he had put up with her little bits of spite and her nagging and her constant presence by the family fireside, but the breaking point had come one Christmas Day when she had topped all spite by telling him to his face that he was impotent. It was something to do with his getting her the wrong Christmas present: “You’ve never been able to give me anything I wanted,” she had said, “not even a grandson.”
There had been no question of putting her away in an Old Folks’ Home; she wouldn’t have agreed to go. So Wesley had decided to kill her. He had cherished the idea, rolling it about in his mind for months, but when that pleasure grew stale he went about the job methodically enough. He made his will, caught up on his work at the office, and, choosing a night when Muriel was out at the Women’s Institute, took the kitchen cleaver upstairs to the bathroom, where his mother-in-law was washing out a pair of stockings.
