The Road from the Monument

by Storm Jameson

  These days of sun and storm excited him. I could go on writing, he thought. No, it would be a mistake. Tomorrow. I’ll take the day off again tomorrow.

  Earlier he had had a message that Lambert would come in on his way home. He had told William to send him straight up. The door opened at this moment. He looked round and saw Lambert following his nose into the room — he had that look on his face, of solemnity with a point of malice, which meant, Gregory knew, that he had unearthed one end of a useful piece of news, or a scandal. With amused affection he thought: How he enjoys nosing them out, like truffles or a bone, and bringing them to me to be turned over.

  ‘Come in,’ he said, smiling. ‘Sherry? What have you brought me?’

  Lambert took his glass, and held it without drinking as he settled himself in his chair. ‘A story, my dear Gregory, a very odd story.’

  I knew it, thought Gregory. ‘Out with it.’

  Lambert came out with it. Gregory listened. He listened attentively, but more and more of his attention had to be turned to suppressing the panic that seized him. A horrible sensation — demoralising, degrading. He kept it out of his face and, before Lambert finished his account of the girl and what she had said, he had it under control. In fact, he had never felt more controlled — in every sense of the word. He could almost watch himself — or the man sitting there in his skin — and hear him speaking in a faintly supercilious voice.

  ‘There are two possibilities — or three. Some man may have called himself Gregory Mott to impress the young woman — though I should hardly have thought that my name would impress the kind of woman you describe. Or she may be an exhibitionist. Or even a blackmailer.’

  ‘I don’t think she was that,’ Lambert said quickly.

  Gregory felt a momentary surprise that his friend — it was obvious — had accepted without a quiver the idea that he had picked up a girl in a café and seduced her. He was only mildly surprised — not, or not deeply, hurt. Perhaps, he reflected coldly, my opinion of human nature is less kindly than I imagined it was…. Before he could stop himself he had thought: Besides — why be surprised that a story which is more or less true is believed?… More or less. He held on to that for a minute before saying,

  ‘Well, you’ve seen her. I haven’t.’

  His coolness, the off-hand brutality of his suggestion that the young woman might be a blackmailer, had shaken Lambert, shaken him severely. It showed in his lean yellow face — as plainly as if he had said so. He’s feeling astonished, even ashamed, that he swallowed the story, Gregory thought mockingly. Few things vex my dear Lambert more than being suspected of naïveté, or of lacking worldly wisdom. Smiling very slightly, he said,

  ‘I suppose you asked her a few questions?’

  ‘I certainly did.’

  ‘And did she produce anything in the nature of evidence to colour her remarkable story?’

  ‘No.’ Lambert shut his thin mouth tightly.

  ‘Nothing? Nothing at all? Merely offered you the story that I took her home and slept with her?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lambert said. ‘Yes.’

  Gregory smiled at him again. ‘Well?’

  Lambert hesitated. Looking his friend squarely in the eyes, a bold twinkling look, he said, ‘To tell you the honest truth, my dear fellow, I didn’t know what to think. I tell you, I was damned worried.’

  ‘You really thought I…?’

  A dull tinge of red seeped through Lambert’s skin, even at his sunken temples and through the dark flesh below his eyes and in the rutted lines furrowing his cheeks. ‘No, no, of course not. But I didn’t know what the hell you might be in for — all sorts of unpleasantness. In your position, a scandal, even one without a shred of truth in it, is particularly damaging.’

  ‘I don’t know that it’s more damaging for me than for any other innocent man. But what did you propose to do?’

  ‘Beyond telling you? Nothing.’

  ‘Obviously you had to tell me,’ Gregory said gently.

  He wondered: Did he, in fact, believe her? Or has he simply run here in a fluster of self-importance, expecting to be praised for his tact — and better still, consulted? In either case, he has covered himself very neatly: he’s adroit. And my old friend. (No one, he thought sharply, believes the worst so readily as an old friend.) But loyal, poor old boy — and I’ve deprived him of the pleasure he would have got out of talking it over, chewing the details, and giving me portentous advice how to behave….

  ‘I’m extremely obliged to you,’ he said. ‘I must think it over.’

  Lambert’s eyes flickered and he rubbed his hands. ‘I didn’t let her go without getting her address. Would you like me to go and see her?’

  ‘No!’ He controlled himself at once. ‘Oh, no, I don’t think so.’

  ‘But you can’t simply ignore it!’

  ‘We can wait,’ Gregory said. ‘If she calls again — or writes — then we shall be forced to deal with it. I shall be forced to deal with it.’

  ‘I take it that you don’t want to put it in the hands of the police?’

  ‘Certainly not.’ He had a sense of collapse: the energy that had been supporting him had withdrawn suddenly: if he had been standing he would have had to reach for a chair. His mouth was dry. He looked briefly at Lambert and thought: I must get rid of him; I must think.

  ‘My dear Gregory, anything I can do…. You’re probably right about the police. And there’s no reason, after all, why anyone should go to see her. She can come to the office. If you like, I’ll write tonight and tell her to come — and that will settle it.’

  A last spasm of energy in Gregory revolted. Even apart from the impossibility of talking to her with Lambert looking on, or sitting, ears cocked, in the next room, the thought of seeing her disgusted him. His face gave this away. He knew it did, and could do nothing about it: disgust is infinitely harder to conceal than fear. He felt fear as well.

  ‘No,’ he said harshly. ‘Do nothing.’

  There was a pause. ‘Well…’ Lambert said. He hesitated. ‘Handle it your own way then.’ He said it pleasantly.

  Gregory had the sensation of striding across a crack in the floor. ‘There was something I had to say to you.’

  ‘About this?’

  ‘No.’ His mouth was still dry, and he moved his tongue clumsily. ‘What was it? Yes, I know…. Now that Easterby really is leaving in June, we shall have to find someone to replace him. Don’t you think we might give the job to Harriet Ellis. She’d be very good.’

  Lambert frowned. ‘But — would she want to do it?’

  ‘I think so.’ He wanted to avoid telling Lambert that she needed money. ‘Yes, I’m certain she would.’

  ‘I’d much sooner have a man.’

  ‘So long as the work is done properly, it hardly seems to me to matter whether a man or a woman does it.’

  ‘Has she any experience?’

  ‘Yes. She was a journalist when I first knew her — as a young woman.’

  ‘Well, if you insist, but frankly I don’t like it.’

  Gregory was too tired to go on arguing. ‘We’ll talk about it later.’

  Lambert stood up. ‘Right. I’ll have some other names for you. We have time.’

  His friend nodded. ‘Do you mind if I don’t get up? I… my back…. I’ve been sitting the whole day.’

  ‘Don’t move, don’t think of moving,’ cried Lambert.

  He walked swiftly to the door. He stood there for a second, his head bent, as if turning something over on his tongue. Gregory thought he was going to speak about the girl. If he were he changed his mind, straightened himself, said, ‘Goodbye, old boy, look after yourself now,’ and went.

  No evidence. Not a scrap.

  He sat for a moment in complete lethargy, his shoulders drawn in, his mind void, except of this one phrase — which seemed to be outside him, in front of his eyes, not behind them. Thought began in him again like life in a frozen limb, with pain.

  He could not understand h
imself. Why had he slandered the girl to Lambert? Why spatter her with what he knew to be lies? Exhibitionist, blackmailer — lies. He would never have believed that he was capable of callous brutality. Her face as he had seen it in Nice rose very distinctly in his mind: its peculiar smoothness and flattened cheekbones, the short fine mouth, the rounded forehead and narrow eyes set flatly below the delicate brows. He felt remorse — as if he had thrashed a child. And shame. And horror of himself — and above all, perplexity. He had lied so easily; the impulse had been as involuntary as lifting a hand to ward off a flying insect. Lies had sprung from him without, it seemed, any effort on his part, any intention to lie. The intention, the will, must have been there. Only, it was not his.

  Nonsense, he thought, nonsense. It was mine. Whose else?

  He got up and went unthinkingly to the window. Outside, it was beginning to be dusk. The young coloured prostitute had taken up her stand opposite, in the crude light of the street-lamps. This time she had a friend with her, a slightly older negress, with the blackest skin imaginable, a black without any gleam of sun in it: she was wearing black and very dark grey, and a black hat, so that her face seemed to be an extension of her clothes, as smooth and featureless. There was something very disagreeable about her. Where the other, in her yellow coat and hat, twisting her yellow parasol, was a figure of fantasy, this one was menacing, a creature from some modern dance of death. Perhaps death herself, he thought briefly, with a smile that lifted one side of his mouth.

  He began to draw the curtains, checked himself, and left them open. He did not want to be shut inside a closed lighted room with his thoughts: so long as there was space in front of him, filled as far as the unseen horizon with the ghosts of trees, buildings, moving lights and shapes, he felt less trapped.

  He made an effort to calm himself.

  What’s the thing to do now? he thought. What can I do?… The obvious course — go and see her, take a firm line — as Lambert would say, come it over her — deny all responsibility (’… no proof: how do I know that some other man…?’) and then offer as an act of charity to help her — presented itself to him — only to be brushed aside as being more disgraceful than any other he might think of. Besides, he thought drily, can I carry it off? I’m not quite such a finished blackguard yet…. And even if he pulled it off, if he could give her this left-handed help, wouldn’t he be admitting to Lambert that the story was true, that for the past hour he had been lying like an animal? Of course. Not the slightest chance of Lambert’s believing that benevolence and a soft heart were driving him to give money to an impudent imposter, possibly a blackmailer. Not a chance.

  I’m making too much of it, he thought…. For a moment he felt baffled by his own indecision. If you suspected that you had a cancer, he told himself, you would act. Then why this — this moral palsy?… If he had not been such an irresponsible fool as to destroy her letter, if he had gone to see her at once, and silenced her. But now…. Now Lambert, he thought angrily. By lying to Lambert he had made everything impossibly difficult for himself. If I’d kept my head, he thought, told him the truth, I should have had him on my side in an ecstasy of cunning and commonsense. Why didn’t I?… At once he felt all the disgust of a sick man for a coarse healthy eater. All that greasy complicity, the long talks, the scheming, the sensible horrible advice he would have had to accept and be grateful for. And always, for the rest of his life, at the back of Lambert’s sunken twinkling eyes, the little secret they shared — two dogs nosing a delicious ordure…. No, he thought, no, no, good God, no.

  I must get ready for dinner, he thought wearily. He switched lights on, drew the curtains, and stood for several minutes with his back to them. After a time he thought: I could pray.

  Kneeling, elbows on the bed, fingers over his eyes, as he knelt every night, he began the words of a prayer. It dried up at once — his mind, like his tongue, was parched. Nothing moved in it. Complete dryness. A complete refusal, like a horse shying.

  Chapter Eleven

  Once or twice during the next two weeks he was on the point of saying in a casual tone,

  ‘You might let me have that young woman’s address.’

  The words never came off his tongue. A lethargy he did not try to shake off had invaded him. With a part of his mind he knew that he was behaving like a hypochondriac who is too afraid of learning the truth about himself to make a move to be cured — but he did nothing: he waited. He was strengthened in his silence and inaction by Lambert’s indifference. Lambert seemed to have dropped the whole affair from his mind, either as no business of his or as of no interest.

  Lambert had not dropped it. He was acting as he always acted when everything he knew about a situation, everything he hoped, even everything he believed, ran counter to what his nose told him. He was leaving it, as it were, to ‘work’ — to ferment gently in a corner of his tortuous mind. Paradoxically, what kept him speculating, and brooding over it, was his conviction, almost conviction, that Gregory was, as always, damn him, blameless. What did he resent worse — having been taken in by the girl, or his friend’s being maddeningly in the right? At least once a day he caught himself thinking: But did she take me in? Was she lying?… The faint, very faint shadow of doubt rested on one tiny incident of his talk with Gregory — the moment when he had suggested sending for her to come to the office and Gregory’s face gave away a revulsion so violent that it must surely have leapt out of something more unpleasant than bored distaste for a tiresome interview.

  The thought of this single tiny crack in Gregory’s serenity came into his mind again and again. It was far from being the first time that the image of Gregory he got from listening to him was not quite the one Gregory had meant to give. But this, this was not merely the irritation he felt when his friend was being a little too dignified and almighty.

  Oh, forget it, forget it, he thought. If she calls here again, it won’t be my doing; I shan’t be responsible…. The thought completed itself slyly, behind his back. If by a wild chance she were telling the truth, she would try again, she would come.

  He let two weeks go by. Then — it was Easter Tuesday — he could not hold out any longer against his curiosity and his inborn craving to know everything there was to be known about people — even, or especially, the scandalous things.

  When he left the office that afternoon, he took a bus that was going to Brixton Road, and began to look for her street. It took him some time to find it. It was a short street off another which was off the Brixton Road: small rather dirty houses with a flight of steps to the front door, and basements. A big slatternly woman answered the bell and when he asked for Miss Verity she told him, ‘Downstairs. The front room.’ He had taken two steps towards the basement staircase when she called after him. ‘Are you the doctor?’ He turned. ‘No. Is she ill?’ The woman opened a large red hand in a scooping movement. ‘Well, if you haven’t seen her,’ she began. ‘I’m from the country — her uncle,’ he said in the voice he used to keep an importunate subordinate in his place. The woman said nothing more, and he went on.

  There were two doors in the dark little passage at the foot of the stairs: one obviously led to a coal-cellar or a storeroom: he knocked at the other. Silence. He knocked again, and this time a thin voice said listlessly, ‘Come in.’

  She was standing facing the door. She looked at him without surprise and without any interest. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I came to see how you are,’ he said gently. The dinginess of the little room — it looked out on a very small area — and the unpleasant smell of old curtains and old old dust filled him with pity for her. But how appalling it is, he thought; I can’t stand it very long.

  ‘Did he send you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why have you come?’

  ‘I told you — ‘he smiled — ‘to have a look at you.’

  ‘You had no need to do that,’ she said, in the same listless voice. ‘It’s not your business.’

  ‘Perhaps not.
But I — well, let’s say I felt anxious. A little. And there were one or two questions I wanted to ask.’

  A mulish look came into her face. ‘Why? I told you everything.’

  ‘Well, now — ‘ he smiled at her again, an almost wheedling smile, as though he were trying to make friends with a child — ‘perhaps you did, and perhaps you forgot a few things. You see, my dear, you gave me very little to go on.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Yes, I think you do,’ he said gently. ‘You know, you didn’t give me any proof that the man you told me about, the man you met in Nice, was Mr. Mott. He said his name was Graham — you told me that yourself. What makes you so sure he was Gregory Mott?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘Yes, you can. Try a little.’

  She said nothing for a moment. He watched her, a little afraid of an hysterical outburst, but the look on her face became more obstinate, closed against him and his probing as tightly as the fingers holding the edge of the small table with its worn cracked oilcloth.

  ‘How am I to try?’ she said sullenly. ‘I told you about it —all.’

  To break her down — and as a test, too — he said deliberately, ‘My dear girl, when I told Mr. Mott that you’d been in the office and what you’d had to say, he said that you were either an hysterical liar or a blackmailer.’

  Her face changed suddenly and completely; it became the face of a child who is being disgraced and laughed at. Stammering, almost crying, she began talking rapidly; words poured out of her, all the words she must have been repeating to herself day in and day out, for weeks, months. And in this room where no one, if she spoke aloud, would hear her.