by A. L. Barker
If he could have picked the panic out of his bones he would have taken himself apart. Or if he could have got himself out of sight and out of mind and waited until it was stale history. For a moment he had a whiff of hope, it smelt of whisky and wintergreen and dust. Then that was gone and the world went as bald as a drum.
Then Brind came and there was something immediate for his fear to feed on. In the workshop was the car. He had found it still wet from last night’s rain and had wiped it down while Rumbold was at the café. Now there was only the petrol level to show that it had been used and he wasn’t worrying about that—Brind would tell him to fill up as he always did, without looking at the gauge, and then there’d be nothing.
He would swear he had never touched the car. He’d say how could he, without a licence? He’d say he locked the workshop last night and the car was in it and that’s all he knew. He’d say, “Why me? I’ve got nowhere to go, what would I want it for? A joy-ride? Some joy when I can’t even drive it.” He’d say, “If it was out last night why is it dry? It rained, remember?” But he’d have to be careful because the tyres were still wet. “I pushed it into the yard to clear the hoist and then I pushed it back again.”
He found he was saying it aloud, across the pump bay, and Brind was in the office door watching. He caught his tongue between his teeth: if he could prickle up without being touched, talk without being asked, he was as good as welshing on himself.
Brind looked across with the light arcing off his spectacles—he had always been able to make Joe prickle up.
Presently Brind went, but only as far as the café. Rumbold kept out of sight in the office. There were no customers. The sun had come out and the pavements were drying like a map. Joe lingered outside the workshop door. He could not go in because of the car. He’d had to touch it and dry it when all he wanted was for it to go over a cliff and into the sea. The sight of it was more than he could stand, it was full of a purpose he had sensed before and now he knew what it was: not so much the death of a woman—who had never had any life except the spark that was for putting out—as the framing of Joe Munn. It had started with him turning round and seeing the car for the first time and now the picture was complete and he had put himself in it.
How many times had he mooned about the car, wondering what it would be like to drive? Some kind of end-all that nothing else would ever match up to? End-all—that’s what it had turned out to be.
There was nothing to do but wait. People went by in the street minding their business—they still had business—and no one looked at him. Yet he was something to look at. He relished that, but briefly, because now that he was different what mattered was that all the others were the same.
There was nothing to do but wait. How long? An hour, a month of Sundays? Was it always going to be like this, with everyone else busy and cosy except him? And if it never happened, if they never did trace him, was this the best he could hope for?
There was a grey underside to the sunlight; he stood up raw and unlicked in the chill of it. He hadn’t asked for anything to happen, unless being alive was asking. He hadn’t expected anything except to be like he was, to be left alone. It seemed there were two ways about that even.
His fear was touched off again by the very things he was looking to for comfort. The familiar street turned sly, everything in it from the broken skyline to the scribbles of chalk on the pavement had a two-faced look. For this brand of terror there was no help without it was given.
The whole story was on the back of his tongue, one word—however barbed—and he would have told it. But when he got to the office Rumbold wasn’t talking, he was on his knees, holding his nose as if there was a smell of sin. Blood dropped through his fingers and the yellows of his eyes rolled wordlessly at Joe. His shirt collar was undone and he was trying to push a monkey-wrench down the back of his neck.
Five minutes later Blind came out of the café and called to Joe to bring his car round.
Joe wanted to say that he was never going to touch the car again, but fear dried up his tongue. He rolled back the workshop door and leaned into the car to let off the handbrake. Brind’s silk scarf lay on the floor. He could see Esther putting it round her neck, holding it to her cheek, and suddenly it looked like her, like a hint in the right quarter—
For the first time since it had happened he thought about her. He tried to relate what he knew of her with what had happened. He knew next to nothing, but the half of it would have been enough. When she felt like it, or perhaps before—when she wanted to feel like something—she would talk. He saw her talking, putting the scarf round her neck, holding it to her cheek. “I could surprise you, seeing’s believing. I never wanted to go in the first place. Why, with him, of course, with Joe Munn—”
He thrust the scarf under the dash and started manhandling the car through the workshop door.
“What’s the matter? Can’t you drive?” said Blind.
“I haven’t got a licence.”
“The yard isn’t a public highway.”
Brind could always make you think he knew something. Joe lined the car up beside the pumps and unhooked the hose. Brind walked away, over to the office while Joe was filling the tank, so that was everything he didn’t know. The needle moved up the gauge and took the evidence with it and Joe felt almost disillusioned at how easy it was being. He screwed on the filler cap, he was safe now: if he’d never really been in any danger it was a kind of snub.
Brind came back smiling. “You’d better get some ice or Rumbold will need a blood transfusion.” He got into his car and sat revving the engine while he lit a cigarette.
Joe turned his back, but the noise ripped the street and the blue bite of the exhaust reached down his throat.
Brind suddenly took his foot from the accelerator and the street pieced itself together again. “Where did you go last night?”
Joe couldn’t believe he had heard, the words were laid so softly on the woolly quiet. He turned, Brind was smiling and settling the cigarette on his lip. “The girl friend, who was she?”
“Girl friend?”
“I never found this a comfortable car for petting.”
Joe knew now that the faceless wonders all had this beak nose and sharp glasses, they peeled him with those glasses.
“I used to think you’d rather get your hands on this car than on any girl.” The glasses twinkled. “Smart of you to manage both.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“There’s no shame in being an opportunist, Joe.”
“I was at the pictures last night. Do you want to know what picture and what the wind-up was?”
Worst of all was the light suddenly going soberly through the lenses and finding himself shouting, giving the game away openhanded to a pair of ordinary boiled-looking eyes that couldn’t have seen through a paper bag.
“What are you afraid of, Joe?”
“Nothing.”
Brind said amiably, “Not of me, anyway,” and got out of the car. His walking round it was for Joe’s benefit, he knew what had happened, and Joe wasn’t afraid of him or of any one—he was just afraid. Brind stopped by the offside front wing. “It’s ugly on corners, I’d have told you that. What did you hit?”
“Nothing.”
“Something hard enough to fracture the lamp glass but not hard enough to smash it.” He came round the car to face Joe. “I think I’d be frightened too.”
“I was cleaning it and it broke—”
“Look at me.”
Joe had to look. Now the eyes weren’t boiled or ordinary, they were sharp, sharper than any glass. “What did you hit?”
“I hit a horse.”
Brind put out his hand as if to touch him, but Joe ducked. “I took it and I drove it to Epping and this horse came out in the dark and broke the lamp.”
It was the last lie he knew. There was only the truth left now and if Brind had laughed he might have told that.
“You took the gir
l to the Forest? You’re not virgin any more then?”
Joe saw that he’d made a bad mistake. It was the horse which made him think of it, something about swapping horses in mid-stream. He had swapped lies, he should have kept to the first one even though it died under him.
“I was tooling along, it was dark and raining and I didn’t see anything in the headlights—we were almost by when she walked into us—”
“She?”
“The horse.”
“Did you stop?”
“Yes, but it was gone by the time I got out of the car—couldn’t have hurt it much.”
Brind flicked his cigarette so that the butt fell by the spilled petrol. Joe trod it out viciously.
“Did you report to the police?”
“Why should I?”
“Why should you?” Brind agreed. “It’s no crime to hit a horse. A mare you said, didn’t you?” He got back into the car. The slam of the door shut Joe up with his secret. He didn’t feel safe, he felt trapped.
He ran to the car and held on, he didn’t care how it looked, he wanted someone to know, or half know.
“What would you do if you were me?”
Brind twinkled at him through the open window. “One man’s truth is another man’s poison, but if that horse is your truth, stick to it.”
“It’s the truth, I tell you!”
“There’s a lot of it about,” said Brind. “You have to pick your own.” He looked along the street to check his exit. “You may choose wrong like Rumbold or wrong like me, but you’ve got to choose.”
The roar of the engine curdled every other sound. Joe fell back as the car broke from under his hands. He was left with words in his throat and a pucker of burnt air.
*
Going home at midday he caught a glimpse of Esther’s red coat in Clydach Street. He had to make an effort to remember her now—once he couldn’t turn around for her. Yet she had been responsible, if it hadn’t been for her he wouldn’t have taken the car last night and any night but last night the dead woman would have found some other way to die.
Esther disappeared round a corner. He found himself running and reaching out for the red coat. If he could get his hands on it he wouldn’t be alone because he didn’t have to tell her anything—she knew.
He came up with her and caught her by the shoulders. She gave a cry, half fright, half pleasure, that ended abruptly as he pulled her round to face him.
“You scared me. I thought it was someone else.” There wasn’t the relief he had hoped for. The red coat seemed to change, to wither and dwindle under his hands. “Joe—you’re hurting!”
He let her go, it was no loss.
She said, tweaking over the coat with finger and thumb, “Someone’s been following me.”
“Following you?” All his logical fears returned, he foresaw time-biding, stone-turning, the give-away, the surprise arrest. “Where? Where is he?”
“He’s gone. I thought it was him when you came up behind me.”
“Was he spying on you?”
“Why should he be spying?”
“They’ve got a line on us about last night.”
It cost him a curious anguish to see that if she hadn’t gone so far as to forget last night it certainly wasn’t in the forefront of her mind.
“He was a bit taken, I expect.”
“Taken?”
“Well, people are, you know. Men—” She touched his hand with the tips of her fingers, “men try to pick me up.”
He suddenly thought about choosing the truth. “Last night,” he said, “what happened last night—” he wasn’t ever likely to have to pick that out from among his memories—“maybe I’ll tell somebody.”
Esther stretched her neck to see herself in a shop window. “Why don’t you?”
“Do you think they don’t know already?”
“Who’s they?”
Useless to tell her they had no name, or nature—except to be always in the know. “The police.”
She smiled dutifully, as if it were a man’s joke.
“Killing cats is legal, but if you run down a dog you’re bound to report it. What I did last night—that was manslaughter.”
“Manslaughter?” She tried the word, rather fancying it, and gave a snicker of laughter. “They’ll say, ‘Thanks for telling us, don’t do it again or we’ll have to hang you’.”
“It’s what I say that counts—if I say it.”
“They’re not even honest, I know something about the police.”
“What do you know?”
“When she died—Camilla—there was an inquest and they didn’t want names mentioned. They tried to make me out a liar. Testifying, they call it.”
“You were with me last night, you’re a witness.”
She stopped in the middle of the pavement. “So I am.”
He could see her getting plump on the thought, like a skinny bird blowing up its feathers, and he thought it was always going to be the same, he was going to reach out and never touch, he was never going to be able to reach far enough. Everyone else had moved on from last night, already it was a bit stale—but there had been a crack in time and he was fixed in it.
“Yes,” she said, “the chief witness.”
She was smoothing her skirt and smiling. Had he said, “Don’t you remember—I killed someone,” she wouldn’t have heard.
“Will there be a proper judge, with a wig?”
“A black cap too, I shouldn’t wonder.”
He left her on the corner of Clydach Street and ran towards the marshalling yards. It was for the sake of running, time and place were inside him and he couldn’t get away from them.
Esther waited for the traffic to clear. When she got across the street he was out of sight. She went along Lampeter Road saying, “Joe?” as if they were playing hide-and-seek.
II
THE NARROW BOAT
NEITHER of them had spoken for a while and the silence was beginning to weigh on the younger woman. She tweaked her dress down over her knees, looking endways at the other who sat with her hands in her lap.
There was nothing to show that she had heard. Her body spread over the settee as casually as when they’d talked of last night’s television programme. Her eyes were unfocussed, the same humid kindness fell the same degree short of wherever she looked.
“You don’t think I wanted to, do you? I’d sooner you found out, there have been plenty of hints by all accounts and someone would have told you sooner or later. At least I’m not getting a kick out of it.” There were plenty who would. Anyone as blameless as Alice Oram always roused that kind of feeling—not malice so much as natural relief at finding her in the same boat after all. “It’ll be later on, when you start thinking—knowing they’re free to make what they like of it.”
That pinkness wasn’t repressed emotion nor the coming of shame, that was the normal condition of her skin, slightly moist as if fresh from a bath. “I know how you must feel, Alice. I’d be the same, I’d feel dirty.” Surely she had the grace to, or was she still trying to take it in? At least she must have begun to wonder, and if she’d never wondered before there must be memories to make it feasible. Putting two and two together she must get the answer now.
“I’m your friend, Alice, this has hit me too. I’ve been between the devil and the deep, afraid to tell you, afraid someone else would. I didn’t believe it at first. When I first heard it I laughed, and then I got angry, and when I went home Ellis said, ‘You look as if you’re running a temperature’, and you know I was boiling, I really was.”
It had been an ordinary day, nothing to remark until a certain conversation, begun she could not remember where, and ending outside the convent school so that now the whole affair was indissolubly mixed with the sight of a nun’s black habit bridling in the wind. Somehow that had confirmed the unoriginality of sin and the chanciness of human happiness and she too had been grateful for the assurance that she wasn’t missing much.
�
��I’ve seen you together, I can truly say I’ve seen a happy family. Nowadays there’s not so much happiness nor so many families. I’m not religious, Alice, I’d as soon think it of the Holy Ghost as of your Frank.”
The big woman moved her head slightly as if to discourage a fly.
“Brazenness is one thing, habit’s another—if they ever thought they were sinning it’s second nature with them now. I’ve asked myself why, when he’s always been such a particular man—” She was aware of her voice bouncing back and she leaned forward to push it home. “You’ve been living a lie, you know, Alice, he’s made liars of you all.” Morally speaking—and she was so much more than moral—Alice Oram could not expect to hold up her head again. Yet she sat on, unimpaired, and as fond as ever, apparently, of what was in front of her nose. “That sort of thing’s hardest on the children.”
She moved then, stirring herself with reluctance and faint distaste rather than any sense of trouble. But as her thighs unfolded, the abundant flesh shaped itself to a gesture of power and the other woman drew back.
Alice went to the window. “I wonder would Ellis know what makes this sill so damp always before we have rain?” She ran her hand along the ledge. “Though I’d be sorry if it was put right.”
“Sorry?”
“It’s quite a barometer.”
“It never does to keep a bad thing to yourself, you must get it out of your system. You must talk, Alice, it’s the only way I can help you.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“I didn’t come here to gossip, I lost some illusions too, you know. It’s you I’m worried about. You need to talk.”
“That’s kind.” She put out a hand and touched the other woman. “But you haven’t told me anything I didn’t know.”
*
Alice went to the door with her friend. They said goodbye and at the gate the younger woman turned to wave. Halfway down the road she looked over her shoulder and awkwardly lifted her hand again. Alice waved back cheerfully. As she turned the corner the friend took one more look, but this time she pretended not to see that Alice was still at the door.
