The Joy-Ride and After

by A. L. Barker

  “If I knew, I’d tell you.”

  “It was money she was after, wasn’t it?”

  “Money?” She smiled as if he had said frankinscence or myrrh. “She knows we haven’t got any.”

  “What did she talk about?”

  “She took her shoes off because her feet hurt and she wouldn’t see over the house because she said she was too puffed but really she was too jealous. And I didn’t want to hear about them, any of them, so she just sat and looked at me. She kept on about me being as skinny as ever and didn’t my husband mind.” Esther coloured delicately. “She always was vulgar.”

  “Vulgar? She’s a dirty fat slut.”

  “I try to remember what’s best about her.”

  She did try, but was that from charity or fear? He watched her lifting saucepan lids and stirring under them with quick tidy movements and the Munn woman sat on in his mind, a spreading dollop from something bad.

  “We’ll talk about it later.” He went to hang up his coat. The house felt dirtied, he persuaded himself there was still a whiff in the corners, strong, bitter and offending.

  He looked into the little dining-room. The table was laid, three coals burned on the hearth, the furniture stood at angles in a pool of polished lino. It was familiar but unappeasing.

  He went up to their bedroom. The drawer of the bureau was locked. In the mirror he saw himself pulling at his lip, wondering, a little gulled, and with sudden irritability pushed between the overlarge bed and the double wardrobe. In the top drawer of the yellow oak dressing-table were his shirts. From beneath them he took an old cricket club tie and shook a key out of the double thickness. Money was never ready in this house, there was always someone or something readier. Only the mortgage payments waited for the end of the month. Each week when he put them aside Bulow thought, here am I, paying to pay, because only a proportion went on the debt.

  He unlocked the bureau and the money was there. He counted it, once, twice, three times. He took the notes to the bed and dropped them on it one by one. Some were dirty, over and above what he was thinking it displeased him to see them on the new pink eiderdown.

  He searched the bureau drawer and turned back to the bed, looking at the notes as if they were pieces of a jigsaw. Then he gathered them up, locked them away and pushed the key into the thickness of the tie.

  *

  She was taking off her flowered apron, the meal was ready to serve and she never sat at table in her apron.

  “So you did give her money.” If he put it as a question she would deny it. The Munns could make her a liar, that was what he was up against: dry water, wooden iron, sometimes he thought the Munns could make her anything.

  She frowned as if at a technical point. “But where would I get money to give her—or anyone?”

  “From the mortgage box.”

  She began folding her apron into squares. “Is that what you’re worrying about?”

  “Yes, that.”

  “Well,” she folded the apron smaller, “I did borrow some of it.”

  “What do you think it is then—a loan club?”

  “I was going to put it back at the end of the week.”

  “Put and take, I put and you take? Listen, I’ve never told you that money up there was holy because I didn’t think I needed to. I thought you knew what it was for—”

  “But isn’t it our money till it’s paid? I was only borrowing from us—”

  “So I should have told you. I’m telling you now.” He took the apron from her hands and threw it aside. “That money isn’t ours, till it’s paid or till Kingdom Come. It belongs to a building society, half my working life belongs to a building society—”

  “I can’t hear when you shout.”

  “—before I’ve worked it and before I’ve lived it. I’m buying time, time under this roof. Do you know what’s the worst dream I dream? That the mortgage money’s missing—lost, stolen or dipped into—and God help me, I don’t know where to turn to make it up!”

  “All I did was to borrow two pounds.”

  “It might as well be twenty the way we live.”

  He couldn’t believe it, it had never happened before, he would have sworn it never could—to anyone else, yes, but not to Bulow and his wife—but he wasn’t getting through. What mattered to him didn’t matter to her. There was something between them, a thick skin was it? Protection? Or a gap?

  Of course he knew what it was. He could see the stockinged feet and the quake of dirty laughter. He took his wife by the chin and turned her face up. “You gave it to her, that’s what she came for, wasn’t it?” When her face warmed for tears he had a feeling she’d given him the slip. It was the way she cried, neither prettily nor openly, but as a painful poor sort of wetting that hurt to watch and to have caused—and the Munns were too near her bone to blame for that. “Why did you? You must tell me!”

  “I had to—she made me—”

  “How could she?”

  “I’m so afraid of them—you don’t know—”

  “Is Joe Munn at the back of this?”

  She moaned, her tongue touching the salt tears on her lips. “You don’t know—”

  “I’m going to. You’re going to tell me what that lout did to get two pounds of my money.”

  He shook her, none too gently, to bring her back to herself, and she struck off his hand with the sudden enmity of a child. “You think that’s all he is?”

  “What else? You’re making him out some sort of bogey.”

  “You’ve never seen him and it wouldn’t make any difference because there’s nothing to show. I’m the only one who knows what he is.”

  “What is he?”

  She looked at him calmly, her face puffed with crying, but bright with some thought or emotion or readiness that he couldn’t fathom.

  “What is he?” he said again, and thinking she wasn’t going to answer, moved to take hold of her. To his surprise she screamed, from the bottom of her throat as if his movement had forced it out.

  “He’s a murderer!”

  Bulow was more shocked by her than by what she had told him. She seemed to have lost sight of herself, she wasn’t looking at him so much as watching how he looked at her.

  He said, “What?” and this time she whispered, rustling and dry, “Joe Munn’s a murderer.”

  He had been caught before by not knowing which end of the scale she was at. She had been near hysteria and called him a murderer when he had to finish off an injured bird in the garden.

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “Tell me about it,” he put his arm about her, “as quietly as you can.”

  “Quietly! You think it happened quietly?” She wouldn’t be held, she pulled away, off balance again, she might go into tears or laughter. “Oh, he was quiet, he’s the quiet sort—that’s all you know, but underneath he’s like a furnace—”

  “You’ll begin at the beginning, won’t you?” said Bulow.

  “If I knew when it was. I suppose the day I went to live there. It started as soon as he saw me. I was only a child, but I knew what he wanted and I was scared to death. There was no one I could talk to, no one to help me—”

  It was not news. She had managed to let him know—though without so many words before—the nature of Joe Munn’s persecution of her, and it was a shared secret, painful in a different way to each of them. With Bulow it was a sore point, he sometimes brooded on it, sometimes as a private grudge, sometimes as the way things were—purity got corrupted and the beast made his mark, all as part of the continuing process of spoiling, dirtying and treading the untrodden. Technically, as she also managed to let him know, she had remained pure. The harm was more delicate and imprecise. Joe Munn had a lot to answer for—but murder?

  “Why don’t you listen?”

  “I’m listening—”

  “Don’t you want to hear? Are you afraid of him too?”

  He tried, absurdly, to stroke her arm, and the breath laboured up to her throat. “H
e took a car, stole it, and made me get in. He drove out into the country, to a lonely place …” She put her face into her hands with a prudish, shamed gesture. “He tore my clothes, but I wouldn’t let him touch me. Then his eyes went red like a dog’s, he didn’t know what he was doing, he drove all over the road, anywhere. There was a woman walking along the path and he drove up over the kerb and ran her down.”

  “Ran her down? On the pavement?”

  “It was grass, it was the country—”

  “Killed her—deliberately?”

  “It was because of me—”

  “It was murder!”

  She looked at him out of her hands. “I said so, didn’t I?”

  “And you left her to die?”

  “She was dead anyway. I drove him to it, I drove him mad. If I’d done what he wanted it would never have happened.”

  “Didn’t you go to the police?”

  “Then he’d have killed me too.” She drew her fingers down her cheeks, scoring them and misshaping her mouth, tired but not able to be done with it. “He had blood on his hands and so it wouldn’t have mattered.”

  “But didn’t you tell anyone at all?”

  “Do you think I could have stood up in front of all those people and told them what he tried to do?”

  “What people?”

  “Why, the jury,” she said. “And the judge.”

  “But there were enquiries, weren’t there? The police must have asked questions?”

  “There was no one to ask.”

  Bulow found he was lighting the cigarette he should have kept until bedtime. He was more annoyed than shocked, perhaps more irritated than annoyed. He did not question that it had happened, what he couldn’t get over was the illogicality of the way it had happened. There was something primary about that which offended him and at the moment it was all he could take. She, of course, had always had to take the rest. He looked at her shoulders, she was most vulnerable where the thin blades poked up, and it seemed to him a crying matter that she had had to take and keep the rest with only her pale fortuitous prettiness to cover it. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  Esther put her arms about herself as if she were cold. “I wanted to forget. You told me to try.”

  “Good God, you couldn’t forget that!” His irritability exploded, unreasonably he let her explode it. “How he got away with it beats me. You couldn’t speak—but you would if you’d been asked. Why didn’t they ask? They had a dead body, didn’t they? What about clues, marks, witnesses? If the police didn’t do anything then, let them do it now!”

  “Now?”

  “I’ll see he pays for what he’s done—better late than never.”

  “But I’d have to make a statement—”

  “You’ll have to tell them what you’ve told me, yes.”

  “They’d want details, about what he did, everything he did to me. You wouldn’t mind?” She looked at him as if asking a special dispensation, and letting him see that he had taken her down another peg. “It wouldn’t matter to you?”

  “I know,” he said, “I know you’ve been hurt enough already—” as if there was a set price and it was going to pay for something—“But apart from what you feel and what I feel—and I’d give my right hand to put a rope round his neck—it’s a question of conscience. It’s the principle—”

  “Principle?” She still held herself with both arms, warming, defending, hiding—whatever she was trying to do, and she showed him the word as a mouthful.

  He said furiously, “I’ve got to go to the police! I must now you’ve told me. Don’t you want him to pay for what he did to you and to that woman?”

  “He can’t. He’s dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “It wouldn’t be any good going to the police.”

  “How do you know he’s dead?”

  “Jessie told me.”

  “But how? What happened?”

  “He fell and broke his neck. You wanted him to break his neck, didn’t you?”

  “Fell? How?”

  “He fell off a roof.”

  “What was he doing on a roof? He wasn’t a builder, he was a mechanic.”

  “He went up the fire escape. Of a cinema. I don’t know what for, perhaps he meant to jump off. Perhaps he was after a girl.”

  There was a hiatus rather than a pause. Bulow didn’t know what to make of her, of the way she was letting herself out of her arms, unwinding, unfreezing, tremulously smiling.

  “I’m glad I told you. You’ll help me, Arthur, won’t you? You’ll help me now?”

  He didn’t know what to make of her. He held her and stroked the sharp blade bones in her back.

  *

  The Rainbird buildings were of precast concrete seamed with bitumen. They looked like badly stacked parcels, but thought had gone into their layout, all the thought of John Rainbird Frick while he was a prisoner of war. According to legend J. R. Frick sat through three unheated German winters drawing and planning and budgeting for Rainbird Plastics Limited, from the moulding machines to the length of the lavatory chains. There was a story that he had got his parents to buy the land, and before they bought they had to send him an inch to the yard map of it, get subsidence and strata checks, estimates for clearing and levelling the site, for bringing up water and electricity, for laying drains and pavings, comparative costs of cartage by rail, road and river, and make an intelligent appraisal of the chances of development of the area. The story went that old Frick died of a tired heart and when J. R. was demobbed he had the land for his factory and the books for the first year’s output while there were still only rabbits and bramble on the site. The story went, for the credulous and hostile, that J. R. Frick’s hypothetical first year’s budget differed from the actual by one and threepence, the price of a roll of mutton cloth that someone had used to clean his boots; and that J. R. had tracked the man down and fired him for pilfering.

  All the stories about Frick were of the warped superman pattern. It was recognised that he was clever, but not in a way that any balanced man would wish to be. He was an organisation machine, geared to make money, but not to spend what he made or organise a life for himself. He put his money back into his businesses and lived in commercial hotels. He had factories in the south and north and divided his time between them. Once he made a business prosper he looked for another to start, from nothing or less than nothing.

  He did not spend much time now at the Ilett factory, but his spirit was on the place and even Dollomore couldn’t dislodge that. Bulow felt it descend on him as he walked through the gate. He accepted it as an occupational allergy, it worked on everyone and everyone had to work against it. If Frick had had it proved to him by work-study experts that he himself inspired most of the non-productive energy he was always talking about, he might not have fretted so when he saw the younger men playing football in their lunch break and heard the girls spent theirs washing and setting each other’s hair—as if energy was bottled gas he’d bought and paid for and had to watch for leakages.

  Bulow’s office was off the stores, just big enough to take his desk, a filing-cabinet and an armchair. On a peg behind the door hung the brown linen coat he wore as canteen manager. He believed that besides keeping his clothes clean it showed him up as the others saw him. Tuesday morning, in the act of putting it on, he took the thing off again and threw it across the room just as the door opened and a girl came in.

  “Mr. Barlow?”

  He was in his shirt sleeves and his arm was still upraised. The overall clung like a giant moth on the wall and then dropped to the floor. The girl stepped back so that she could look at the name on the door.

  “Bulow. I’m sorry.”

  While he was thinking how to explain the flight of the overall she closed the door and seated herself in the armchair. “I’m your shorthand typist.”

  “My shorthand typist?”

  “Yours and about fifty other people’s. I’m from the typists’ pool.” She looked up, un
smiling. “Puddle, I should say.”

  “Excuse me,” said Bulow, “I didn’t know you were coming.”

  “You asked, I suppose?”

  “I’m always asking, but I usually end up doing it myself with one finger. Don’t worry, I’ve got plenty of work for you, just let me sort it out.”

  He went to his desk and picked up papers at random. He turned his in-tray upside down. A wad of pools coupons lay on top.

  She was a pretty girl, made up with too much green eyeshadow, and bouffant hair.

  “You’re new, aren’t you, Miss—?”

  “Winegarden.”

  “Here’s something. A letter to J. W. Teague, Limited. ‘Dear Sirs, Reference your communication of the 5th instant, 29/4835/JWT, we note your comments about the twenty-eight day perishable period but cannot agree your quotation—’ Let me know if I’m going too fast.”

  Streetfield, the works manager, put his head round the door. “Don’t keep her all day, I’ve got some machinery orders to get out.” He winked. “She’s good.”

  “That man’s a nuisance,” she said, almost before he was out of earshot.

  “In what way?”

  “He thinks he’s Nature’s gift to women.”

  “All men do.”

  “I shouldn’t have thought you’d any illusions.”

  She looked calmly at him, pencil poised over her book. He dictated a dozen letters and she took them down without fuss or query. Once she stopped him. “‘Try and’ is ungrammatical.”

  He wondered how old would she be? With all that stuff on her face it was hard to tell. “This is a business letter, not a literary essay.”

  “Don’t you want to make a good impression?”

  She was trying for that, he supposed, with her green eyelids and ball of hair—good for one thing. “If I’ve no illusions why should I give anyone else any?” He dictated a few more letters then said, “That’ll do, it’s time for your tea break.” She snapped the elastic band on her notebook and stood up, smoothing her skirt over her knees.

  “Do you think you’ll like it here?”

  “That depends on how I’m treated.”

  “You’ll be treated all right. This isn’t a bad firm to work for.”