Mr Hutton’s indignation evaporated. He was dismayed, frightened. It was all too fantastic to be taken seriously, and yet this nightmare was a fact – it was actually happening.
M’Nab had seen them kissing, often. He had taken them for a drive on the day of Mrs Hutton’s death. He could see them reflected in the wind-screen, sometimes out of the tail of his eye.
The inquest was adjourned. That evening Doris went to bed with a headache. When he went to her room after dinner, Mr Hutton found her crying.
‘What’s the matter?’ He sat down on the edge of her bed and began to stroke her hair. For a long time she did not answer, and he went on stroking her hair mechanically, almost unconsciously; sometimes, even, he bent down and kissed her bare shoulder. He had his own affairs, however, to think about. What had happened? How was it that the stupid gossip had actually come true? Emily had died of arsenic poisoning. It was absurd, impossible. The order of things had been broken, and he was at the mercy of an irresponsibility. What had happened, what was going to happen? He was interrupted in the midst of his thoughts.
‘It’s my fault – it’s my fault!’ Doris suddenly sobbed out. ‘I shouldn’t have loved you; I oughtn’t to have let you love me. Why was I ever born?’
Mr Hutton didn’t say anything, but looked down in silence at the abject figure of misery lying on the bed.
‘If they do anything to you I shall kill myself.’
She sat up, held him for a moment at arm’s length, and looked at him with a kind of violence, as though she were never to see him again.
‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’ She drew him, inert and passive, towards her, clasped him, pressed herself against him. ‘I didn’t know you loved me as much as that, Teddy Bear. But why did you do it – why did you do it?’
Mr Hutton undid her clasping arms and got up. His face became very red. ‘You seem to take it for granted that I murdered my wife,’ he said. ‘It’s really too grotesque. What do you all take me for? A cinema hero?’ He had begun to lose his temper. All the exasperation, all the fear and bewilderment of the day, was transformed into a violent anger against her. ‘It’s all such damned stupidity. Haven’t you any conception of a civilized man’s mentality? Do I look the sort of man who’d go about slaughtering people! I suppose you imagined I was so insanely in love with you that I could commit any folly. When will you women understand that one isn’t insanely in love? All one asks for is a quiet life, which you won’t allow one to have. I don’t know what the devil ever induced me to marry you. It was all a damned stupid, practical joke. And now you go about saying I’m a murderer. I won’t stand it.’
Mr Hutton stamped towards the door. He had said horrible things, he knew – odious things that he ought speedily to unsay. But he wouldn’t. He closed the door behind him.
‘Teddy Bear!’ He turned the handle; the latch clicked into place. ‘Teddy Bear!’ The voice that came to him through the closed door was agonized. Should he go back? He ought to go back. He touched the handle, then withdrew his fingers and quickly walked away. When he was half-way down the stairs he halted. She might try to do something silly – throw herself out of the window or God knows what! He listened attentively; there was no sound. But he pictured her very clearly, tiptoeing across the room, lifting the sash as high as it would go, leaning out into the cold night air. It was raining a little. Under the window lay the paved terrace. How far below? Twenty-five or thirty feet? Once, when he was walking along Piccadilly, a dog had jumped out of a third-storey window of the Ritz. He had seen it fall; he had heard it strike the pavement. Should he go back? He was damned if he would; he hated her
He sat for a long time in the library. What had happened? What was happening? He turned the question over and over in his mind and could find no answer. Suppose the nightmare dreamed itself out to its horrible conclusion. Death was waiting for him. His eyes filled with tears; he wanted so passionately to live. ‘Just to be alive.’ Poor Emily had wished it too, he remembered: ‘Just to be alive.’ There were still so many places in this astonishing world unvisited, so many queer delightful people still unknown, so many lovely women never so much as seen. The huge white oxen would still be dragging their wains along the Tuscan roads, the cypresses would still go up, straight as pillars, to the blue heaven; but he would not be there to see them. And the sweet southern wines – Tear of Christ and Blood of Judas – others would drink them, not he. Others would walk down the obscure and narrow lanes between the bookshelves in the London Library, sniffing the dusty perfume of good literature, peering at strange titles, discovering unknown names, exploring the fringes of vast domains of knowledge. He would be lying in a hole in the ground. And why, why? Confusedly he felt that some extraordinary kind of justice was being done. In the past he had been wanton and imbecile and irresponsible. Now Fate was playing as wantonly, as irresponsibly, with him. It was tit for tat, and God existed after all.
He felt that he would like to pray. Forty years ago he used to kneel by his bed every evening. The nightly formula of his childhood came to him almost unsought from some long unopened chamber of the memory. ‘God bless Father and Mother, Tom and Cissie and the Baby, Mademoiselle and Nurse, and everyone that I love, and make me a good boy. Amen.’ They were all dead now – all except Cissie.
His mind seemed to soften and dissolve; a great calm descended upon his spirit. He went upstairs to ask Doris’s forgiveness. He found her lying on the couch at the foot of the bed. On the floor beside her stood a blue bottle of liniment, marked ‘Not to be taken’; she seemed to have drunk about half of it.
‘You didn’t love me,’ was all she said when she opened her eyes to find him bending over her.
Dr Libbard arrived in time to prevent any very serious consequences. ‘You mustn’t do this again,’ he said while Mr Hutton was out of the room.
‘What’s to prevent me?’ she asked defiantly.
Dr Libbard looked at her with his large, sad eyes. ‘There’s nothing to prevent you,’ he said. ‘Only yourself and your baby. Isn’t it rather bad luck on your baby, not allowing it to come into the world because you want to go out of it?’
Doris was silent for a time. ‘All right,’ she whispered. ‘I won’t.’
Mr Hutton sat by her bedside for the rest of the night. He felt himself now to be indeed a murderer. For a time he persuaded himself that he loved this pitiable child. Dozing in his chair, he woke up, stiff and cold, to find himself drained dry, as it were, of every emotion. He had become nothing but a tired and suffering carcass. At six o’clock he undressed and went to bed for a couple of hours’ sleep. In the course of the same afternoon the coroner’s jury brought in a verdict of ‘Wilful Murder’, and Mr Hutton was committed for trial.
6
Miss Spence was not at all well. She had found her public appearances in the witness-box very trying, and when it was all over she had something that was very nearly a breakdown. She slept badly, and suffered from nervous indigestion. Dr Libbard used to call every other day. She talked to him a great deal – mostly about the Hutton case. … Her moral indignation was always on the boil? Wasn’t it appalling to think that one had had a murderer in one’s house? Wasn’t it extraordinary that one could have been for so long mistaken about the man’s character? (But she had had an inkling from the first.) And then the girl he had gone off with – so low class, so little better than a prostitute. The news that the second Mrs Hutton was expecting a baby – the posthumous child of a condemned and executed criminal – revolted her; the thing was shocking – an obscenity. Dr Libbard answered her gently and vaguely, and prescribed bromide.
One morning he interrupted her in the midst of her customary tirade. ‘By the way,’ he said in his soft, melancholy voice, ‘I suppose it was really you who poisoned Mrs Hutton.’
Miss Spence stared at him for two or three seconds with enormous eyes, and then quietly said ‘Yes’. After that she started to cry.
‘In the coffee, I suppose.’
She
seemed to nod assent. Dr Libbard took out his fountain-pen, and in his neat, meticulous calligraphy wrote out a prescription for a sleeping-draught.
V. S. Pritchett
THE FLY IN THE OINTMENT
IT was the dead hour of a November afternoon. Under the ceiling of level mud-coloured cloud, the latest office buildings of the city stood out alarmingly like new tombstones, among the mass of older buildings. And along the streets the few cars and the few people appeared and disappeared slowly as if they were not following the roadway or the pavement but some inner, personal route. Along the road to the main station, at intervals of two hundred yards or so, unemployed men and one or two beggars were dribbling slowly past the desert of public buildings to the next patch of shop fronts.
Presently a taxi stopped outside one of the underground stations and a man of thirty-five paid his fare and made off down one of the small streets.
Better not arrive in a taxi, he was thinking. The old man will wonder where I got the money.
He was going to see his father. It was his father’s last day at his factory, the last day of thirty years’ work and life among these streets, building a business out of nothing, and then, after a few years of prosperity, letting it go to pieces in a chafer of rumour, idleness, quarrels, accusations and, at last, bankruptcy.
Suddenly all the money quarrels of the family, which nagged in the young man’s mind, had been dissolved. His dread of being involved in them vanished. He was overcome by the sadness of his father’s situation. Thirty years of your life come to an end. I must see him. I must help him. All the same, knowing his father, he had paid off the taxi and walked the last quarter of a mile.
It was a shock to see the name of the firm, newly painted too, on the sign outside the factory and on the brass of the office entrance, newly polished. He pressed the bell at the office window inside and it was a long time before he heard footsteps cross the empty room and saw a shadow cloud the frosted glass of the window.
‘It’s Harold, Father,’ the young man said. The door was opened.
‘Hullo, old chap. This is very nice of you, Harold,’ said the old man shyly, stepping back from the door to let his son in, and lowering his pleased, blue eyes for a second’s modesty.
‘Naturally I had to come,’ said the son, shyly also. And then the father, filled out with assurance again and taking his son’s arm, walked him across the floor of the empty workroom.
‘Hardly recognize it, do you? When were you here last?’ said the father.
This had been the machine-room, before the machines had gone. Through another door was what had been the showroom, where the son remembered seeing his father, then a dark-haired man, talking in a voice he had never heard before, a quick, bland voice, to his customers. Now there were only dust-lines left by the shelves on the white brick walls, and the marks of the showroom cupboards on the floor. The place looked large and light. There was no throb of machines, no hum of voices, no sound at all, now, but the echo of their steps on the empty floors. Already, though only a month bankrupt, the firm was becoming a ghost.
The two men walked towards the glass door of the office. They were both short. The father was well-dressed in an excellent navy-blue suit. He was a vigorous, broad man with a pleased impish smile. The sunburn shone through the clipped white hair of his head and he had the simple, trim, open-air look of a snow-man. The son beside him was round-shouldered and shabby, a keen but anxious fellow in need of a hair-cut and going bald.
‘Come in, Professor,’ said the father. This was an old family joke. He despised his son, who was, in fact, not a professor but a poorly paid lecturer at a provincial university.
‘Come in,’ said the father, repeating himself, not with the impatience he used to have, but with the habit of age. ‘Come inside, into my office. If you can call it an office now,’ he apologized. ‘This used to be my room, do you remember, it used to be my office. Take a chair. We’ve still got a chair. The desk’s gone, yes, that’s gone, it was sold, fetched a good price – what was I saying?’ he turned a bewildered look to his son. ‘The chair. I was saying they have to leave you a table and a chair. I was just going to have a cup of tea, old boy, but – pardon me,’ he apologized again, I’ve only one cup. Things have been sold for the liquidators and they’ve cleaned out nearly everything. I found this cup and teapot upstairs in the foreman’s room. Of course, he’s gone, all the hands have gone, and when I looked around just now to lock up before taking the keys to the agent when I hand over today, I saw this cup. Well, there it is. I’ve made it. Have a cup?’
‘No, thanks,’ said the son, listening patiently to his father. ‘I have had my tea.’
‘You’ve had your tea? Go on. Why not have another?’
‘No, really, thanks,’ said the son. ‘You drink it.’
‘Well,’ said the father, pouring out the tea and lifting the cup to his soft rosy face and blinking his eyes as he drank, ‘I feel badly about this. This is terrible. I feel really awful drinking this tea and you standing there watching me, but you say you’ve had yours – well, how are things with you? How are you? And how is Alice? Is she better? And the children? You know I’ve been thinking about you – you look worried. Haven’t lost sixpence and found a shilling have you, because I wouldn’t mind doing that?’
‘I’m all right,’ the son said, smiling to hide his irritation. ‘I’m not worried about anything. I’m just worried about you. This’ – he nodded with embarrassment to the dismantled showroom, the office from which even the calendars and wastepaper-basket had gone – ‘this’ – what was the most tactful and sympathetic word to use? – ‘this is bad luck,’ he said.
‘Bad luck?’ said the old man sternly.
‘I mean,’ stammered his son, ‘I heard about the creditors’ meeting. I knew it was your last day – I thought I’d come along, I… to see how you were.’
‘Very sweet of you, old boy,’ said the old man with zest. ‘Very sweet. We’ve cleared everything up. They got most of the machines out today. I’m just locking up and handing over. Locking up is quite a business. There are so many keys. It’s tiring, really. How many keys do you think there are to a place like this? You wouldn’t believe it, if I told you.’
‘It must have been worrying,’ the son said.
‘Worrying? You keep on using that word. I’m not worrying. Things are fine,’ said the old man, smiling aggressively. ‘I feel they’re fine. I know they’re fine.’
‘Well, you always were an optimist,’ smiled his son.
‘Listen to me a moment. I want you to get this idea,’ said his father, his warm voice going dead and rancorous and his nostrils fidgeting. His eyes went hard, too. A different man was speaking, and even a different face; the son noticed for the first time that like all big-faced men his father had two faces. There was the outer face like a soft warm and careless daub of innocent sealing-wax and inside it, as if thumbed there by a seal, was a much smaller one, babyish, shrewd, scared and hard. Now this little inner face had gone greenish and pale and dozens of little veins were broken on the nose and cheeks. The small, drained, purplish lips of this little face were speaking. The son leaned back instinctively to get just another inch away from this little face.
‘Listen to this,’ the father said and leaned forward on the table as his son leaned back, holding his right fist up as if he had a hammer in his hand and was auctioning his life. ‘I am sixty-five. I don’t know how long I shall live, but let me make this clear: if I were not an optimist I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t stay another minute.’ He paused, fixing his son’s half-averted eyes to let the full meaning of his words bite home. ‘I’ve worked hard,’ the father went on. ‘For thirty years I built up this business from nothing. You wouldn’t know it, you were a child, but many’s the time coming down from the North I’ve slept in this office to be on the job early the next morning.’ He looked decided and experienced like a man of forty, but now he softened to sixty again. The ring in the hard voice began to sof
ten into a faint whine and his thick nose sniffed. ‘I don’t say I’ve always done right,’ he said. ‘You can’t live your life from A to Z like that. And now I haven’t a penny in the world. Not a cent. It’s not easy at my time of life to begin again. What do you think I’ve got to live for? There’s nothing holding me back. My boy, if I wasn’t an optimist I’d go right out. I’d finish it’ Suddenly the father smiled and the little face was drowned in a warm flood of triumphant smiles from the bigger face. He rested his hands on his waistcoat and that seemed to be smiling too, his easy coat smiling, his legs smiling and even winks of light on the shining shoes. Then he frowned.
‘Your hair’s going thin,’ he said. ‘You oughtn’t to be losing your hair at your age. I don’t want you to think I’m criticizing you, you’re old enough to live your own life, but your hair you know – you ought to do something about it. If you used oil every day and rubbed it in with both hands, the thumbs and forefingers is what you want to use, it would be better. I’m often thinking about you and I don’t want you to think I’m lecturing you, because I’m not, so don’t get the idea this is a lecture, but I was thinking, what you want, what we all want, I say this for myself as well as you, what we all want is ideas – big ideas. We go worrying along but you just want bigger and better ideas. You ought to think big. Take your case. You’re a lecturer. I wouldn’t be satisfied with lecturing to a small batch of people in a university town. I’d lecture the world. You know, you’re always doing yourself injustice. We all do. Think big.’
The Penguin Book of English Short Stories Page 30
