London Belongs to Me

by Norman Collins

  Connie’s answer appeared to satisfy Mr Barks.

  ‘Let’s hear all about the accident,’ he said. ‘Want to know the details.’

  He only interrupted her once and that was to correct her when she went wrong.

  ‘Shouldn’t say anything about what the crowd said,’ he advised her. ‘Not if you were unconscious at the time. Very important point that. Probably just thought you heard it all. Make a bad impression on a jury if it comes to one. Can’t be too careful, y’know.’

  When Connie had finished, Mr Barks spoke again.

  ‘Any nightmares since it happened?’ he asked.

  ‘Nightmares!’ Connie repeated, the little nervous giggle breaking through again. ‘How can you have nightmares if you can’t even get to sleep?’

  Mr Barks made a note on his pad.

  ‘Insomnia,’ he said. ‘Very important point that insomnia. Have you seen a doctor?’

  ‘Not again,’ she told him.

  ‘Should do. Go back to the hospital and tell ’em. Make ’em re‐examine you. And if they keep you in for the night remember it’s insomnia you’re there for.’ Mr Barks paused to answer the telephone and wrote down £4 6s. 8d. on his blotting‐paper. Then he hung up and turned to Connie again.

  ‘Appetite?’ he asked. ‘Can you still manage your food?’

  Connie shook her head.

  ‘I tried to manage a snack the other night,’ she said. ‘Just a snack. But up it came. Nothing seems to settle since it happened. It’s down one moment and up again the next. Just like a lift.’

  ‘Tell ’em that too at the hospital,’ Mr Barks insisted. ‘Very important. Insomnia and vomiting. Been back at work?’

  ‘I had to,’ Connie answered. ‘I didn’t want to find myself out on my ear just because some gentleman couldn’t drive his car in the black‐out.’

  Mr Barks frowned.

  ‘Mistake all the same,’ he told her. ‘Bad mistake. May prejudice them. Very dangerous to go on working. No sleep. No food. Oughtn’t to risk it. Try and take a holiday if you can afford it. Hope to get it all back later.’

  ‘And some over?’ Connie asked, smiling up at him.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Mr Barks corrected her. ‘Can’t say. Won’t guess. Great mistake. Better see what happens. May agree to settle out of court. All depends.’

  ‘But you’ll do your best?’

  ‘I’ll handle the case,’ Mr Barks replied.

  He got up as he said it and held the door open for her. Connie would have liked a handshake just to clinch matters. But Mr Barks had to excuse himself. His phone was ringing again and the tousled‐looking articled clerk was hanging about for him. Through the half‐open door – the door into the inner office, not the one straight on to the staircase – she saw the figure of Mr Josser. He had evidently been fussing about the appeal again.

  Chapter LX

  1

  Mr Squales’ glorious week‐end was over and he was back in Dulcimer Street again.

  At the present moment, he and Mrs Vizzard were sitting facing each other across the small table on which the backgammon board – the late Mr Vizzard’s backgammon board – was set out. It had been the deceased’s one relaxation, backgammon. Evening after evening, he had sat crouched forward in his chair, his flat expressionless face bent over the pieces, studying the lay of the home table, the pieces on the bar, the blots. He had not been a good player – had been a very bad one, in fact – and Mrs Vizzard had beaten him every time at working off. But there was evidently something in his continued unsuccess which attracted him. It made his work and his play all of a piece.

  And now where the pale ineffectiveness of Mr Vizzard had once sat, Mr Squales was now sitting. Every time Mrs Vizzard looked at him she experienced the same extraordinary feeling of inner fluidity. It was as though one glance at him could reduce to nothingness those impregnable walls with which womankind over the ages had surrounded itself. Her own inconstancy, the thought that perhaps she was at heart a fickle wench, worried Mrs Vizzard. She was sorry now that she had ever brought down the backgammon board from its shelf. It was such a link with the past – and such a barrier. For there was nothing of Mr Vizzard in Mr Squales’ playing. He had picked up the principles of the game in a single session. By now, he played like a master. His luck with the dice was positively uncanny. Fives and sixes came tumbling out with every throw. And more than once Mrs Vizzard had wondered if anyone’s luck with dice could really be so consistent or whether this baffling fiancé of hers were cheating.

  ‘My game, I think, kitten,’ Mr Squales observed at last, and leant over to give her hand a playful pinch.

  ‘Your game, dear,’ she agreed. ‘You’re too clever for me.’

  Mr Squales smiled.

  ‘Not clever,’ he told her. ‘Merely lucky.’

  And he smiled again.

  ‘Lucky at cards, unlucky in love,’ Mrs Vizzard remarked absently, and then wondered immediately why she had said it.

  Mr Squales, however, was able to turn the remark easily enough. ‘Backgammon isn’t cards,’ he reminded her. ‘And I’m certainly lucky in love. Pussy wouldn’t deny that, would she?’

  Mrs Vizzard did not reply at once. It was being such an agreeable evening that she was hesitant about doing anything that might disrupt it. But if she never spoke, if she never uttered what was uppermost in her mind, she was sure that he wouldn’t. Plucking up her courage, she said it.

  ‘Have you thought anything more about going out and getting a job for yourself ?’ she asked.

  The smile which had been still hanging around the deep corners of Mr Squales’ mouth and in his dark impenetrable eyes, vanished. A look of shock and surprise took its place. It was as though she had hurt him.

  ‘Why? Are you worried about me?’ he asked.

  She raised her hand and made a movement as though she were brushing away something invisible that stood between them.

  ‘It isn’t that,’ she assured him. ‘You know it isn’t. It’s simply that… that…’

  ‘That what?’ Mr Squales asked coldly.

  ‘That you told me that you were considering it,’ she finished lamely.

  Mr Squales relaxed a little.

  ‘So I am,’ he told her. ‘Constantly considering it.’ He paused. ‘And I haven’t yet come to any conclusion. That’s all it is.’

  It was dangerous, she knew, to go on any further. She had noticed the change that had come over him when she had first raised the subject. And these few hours alone together were far too precious to be spoiled. But she had to say what was pressing so hard inside her to be said.

  ‘You know why I asked?’ she said shyly.

  ‘Because you want to see me self‐supporting,’ Mr Squales replied brutally.

  His voice was cold, and it frightened her.

  ‘Only for one reason,’ she told him.

  ‘So that I can marry you,’ Mr Squales answered in the same hard, unfeeling manner. ‘Do you think that you need remind me of my own condition?’

  Then, just as the evening was threatening to break up in storm‐clouds and misery, the other Mr Squales suddenly broke through. He held out his arms towards her, tenderly, solicitously.

  ‘If I could bring that day a minute, nay, a second nearer, I would go out and tie myself to a desk to‐morrow. For your sake I would become a clerk, a commercial traveller, a counter‐jumper, anything.’

  ‘Oh, Rico.’

  ‘But I’m afraid that I shouldn’t become a very good one. My kitten must remember that,’ he told her. ‘I haven’t been trained for that kind of life. I’ve devoted myself to what I’ve been proud to think of as the higher things. Sometimes you almost make me doubt whether they really are…’

  Mrs Vizzard leaned forward.

  ‘Oh, Rico,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking. Why must you wait even if you haven’t got a proper job. It’s so noble of you – but it’s so long. Let’s get married straightaway.’

  Mr Squales made no reply. But Mrs Vizz
ard was too excited to notice. She was carried away by her own shamelessness, by this open declaration of her urgent need for him.

  ‘We needn’t live down here,’ she added as though tempting him further. ‘We can move up into the Boons’ room. They’ll never be coming back – either of them.’

  This time when Mr Squales still did not reply, she grew apprehensive. And then, as she looked at him, she realised that he hadn’t even been listening. His eyes were fixed on the window above her head – the window that showed two foot of carefully white‐washed area wall, then the ornamental pattern of the railings and, through them, the houses opposite. Mrs Vizzard turned and looked, too.

  But when Mrs Vizzard looked there was no one there. And by now Mr Squales was relaxed again.

  ‘I thought I saw someone I knew,’ was all he said.

  2

  Mrs Josser distinctly heard footsteps overhead. She paused in what she was doing and listened. But there was silence. The complete, unnatural silence that there had been ever since the Boons, mother and son, had gone away. Then, just as Mrs Josser had resumed her mending, she heard the sounds again. They were slow, unmistakable footsteps.

  Unreasonably, they alarmed her. For a moment it was as though she had slid back three months in time and Clarice Boon were light‐heartedly pottering about upstairs; waiting for Percy probably. Then common sense took over, and she realised that it was probably only old Connie snooping around to see if there were any little trifles that she could borrow. Or Mrs Vizzard: it may have been that the landlady herself was furtively inspecting her property.

  Whatever it was, Mrs Josser decided to go and see. She put down Mr Josser’s sock, re‐buttoned her shoes and went straight up. There was no need for subterfuge and Red Indian stuff on her part. Whoever was in Mrs Boon’s room had no way of escape except across the rooftops…

  The door was closed when she got there, and Mrs Josser stood outside listening. The same stealthy shuffling footsteps. And then Mrs Josser realised something else: that there was no shaft of light from beneath the door. The intruder, whoever it was, was going about the room in darkness. Mrs Josser raised her hand and knocked. The sounds stopped immediately. There was no reply, however. And Mrs Josser knocked again.

  This time the door opened as though the person behind it had been standing there all the time. And, with the opening of the door the light from the gas bracket on the floor below crept into the room. Mrs Josser remained there staring.

  It was Mrs Boon who stood facing her.

  But it was not the Mrs Boon who had gone away. This was an older, a feebler, woman. Almost an old one, in fact. The hand that she held out to Mrs Josser was shaky. And, now that she came out further into the light, those sagging, frightening lines down the left side of her face were revealed. Just as they had been in the infirmary.

  ‘Clarrie!’ Mrs Josser said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  The woman in front of her was trying to speak. And it was a difficult process. There was one corner of her mouth that was idle and india‐rubbery. She made two false, lisping starts before the words finally came.

  ‘I had to come,’ she said. ‘I had to be near him.’

  Mrs Josser had got her downstairs now. She was sitting in Mr Josser’s chair with a cup of tea resting in her lap – the actual holding of a teacup was apparently a strain that was too great to be undertaken – and her feet stretched out towards the fire. It had not been easy getting her downstairs. Mr Josser was out – the South London Parliament was still in session – and Mrs Josser had been forced to do everything single‐handed.

  Not that she minded. The last thing that she wanted at the moment was interruption. And by keeping Mrs Boon to herself, Mrs Josser was able to get quite a lot out of the poor exhausted woman. She learnt, for a start, how it was that Mrs Boon had been able to climb all those stairs without anybody hearing her. The truth came tumbling out with the unself‐consciousness that goes with utter physical fatigue.

  ‘I went up on all fours,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t have managed it any other way.’

  She’d been meaning to come for the past week, it seemed; meaning to come, and planning. But there had been difficulties, big difficulties, to be surmounted first. The doctors had said that she wasn’t strong enough. And the Sisters had echoed the doctors. There’d been the fare for the taxi, too: she hadn’t got any money left – any money at all – after she’d paid Mrs Vizzard for her room. So she had done the obvious thing. Last week she had not paid Mrs Vizzard. She was quite sure, she said, that Mrs Vizzard would understand. And it would all come right, of course, as soon as Percy was working again. Then, between them, they’d be able to pay off any little debts that had accumulated.

  Mrs Boon was so weak that she broke off suddenly in the middle of sentences – even in the middle of words sometimes – and just sat there, her lips moving but no sounds coming. The tea, however, was reviving her; and with her strength her spirits were returning.

  ‘I knew I’d feel better as soon as I was back among friends,’ she said at last. ‘It’s what I’ve been telling them.’

  She was not so much grateful for Mrs Josser’s attentions as placid and unresisting. It was evident that she had been an invalid for long enough to expect other people to wait on her. Not that her inner purpose in coming had anything about it that was invalidish or dejected. On the contrary, it was evident from odd remarks that she let fall that it was for a great deal more than merely to be near Percy that she had made the journey. A very great deal more. She was going to see every one – Mr Barks, Mr Veesey Blaize, the judge, the Lord Chief Justice, the police, the counsel for the prosecution – every one, in fact, who was in any way mixed up in this slur upon her son’s good name. A ferocious maternal protectiveness emanated from her. She was like a lioness.

  In the meantime, however, she was content to be looked after and cossetted. Content even to gossip. And it was the black‐out that she wanted to discuss. This new terror was something that had descended since her time. The London that she had left had been a London that met the dark each evening with a million lights and fought it. Then in the infirmary she had watched the Sisters, night after night, fitting brown‐paper frames into all the windows and drawing the thick curtains over them. But that had seemed no more than a piece of the painstaking pattern of their life. Earlier and earlier each day she had seen the shutters go up and the curtains drawn – and, with the natural egotism of the invalid – never once had she wondered what it was like outside.

  It was not, indeed, until she had emerged that she realised that, while she had been lying in her bed, chaos black and original had come to earth again.

  ‘I nearly turned back when I saw it,’ she admitted. ‘Then I remembered Percy and I came on.’

  Chapter LXI

  1

  What they had all been waiting for had come to pass: the appeal had been heard.

  And it had been dismissed. The last ordinances of the Law had been uttered. And nothing but the king’s clemency could now save Percy. In the meantime he was being made as comfortable as circumstances would allow in Wandsworth. It wasn’t the same cell, but he still had Scottie to sit with him and tell him about his experiences.

  Considering how important the appeal was, it all passed off very quietly. The evening papers, full of a big Finnish victory over the Russians, practically ignored it. ‘APPEAL DISMISSED’ was all that two of them said, and the third put in a line about ‘MURDERER TO DIE,’ underneath some air news and the latest picture of the Graf Spee with only her upper‐parts showing above water. The contemptuousness of the treatment depressed Mr Josser still further. For Percy to have descended from headlines and the stop press to the very bottom of the column served to add a new note of dreadfulness to the whole affair. It was as though murders, instead of being very large and terrible, were really quite commonplace and trivial. As though either No. 10 Dulcimer Street or Fleet Street had been getting the affair of Percy Boon all out of proportion.

>   Mr Josser hadn’t been along to the Lord Chief Justice’s court himself because it had been rent‐day. Nor, as it turned out, had any one else of the immediate circle. When the fateful morning had actually come, all Mrs Boon’s decisions, her determination, her nervous energy, her resoluteness, were seen for the empty, futile things they were. The simple fact was that she wasn’t fit to leave the house, and Mrs Josser stayed in to look after her.

  So much for the Jossers. But what about Mrs Vizzard and Mr Squales? Mr Squales himself had been rather looking forward to going. Human nature in the raw, he explained, was one of his hobbies; and about the rawest place that he knew for human nature was in a law court. But Mrs Vizzard was by now utterly opposed. She wanted to dissociate herself entirely from the whole sordid business. Wanted to give Mrs Boon notice and forget that such a thing as a murderer had ever lived under any roof of hers. It was, in a sense, a tribute to Mr Squales’ good nature that he gave way. That, and the fact that he was temporarily out of cash again. He hadn’t, as it happened, got even his bus fare.

  As for Mr Puddy, he had intended right up to the last minute to cut his sleep and go along. But even that came to nothing. Because of something that he’d eaten – he couldn’t rightly name what – he came off duty with a nasty attack of heartburn. And just when all the fun was happening, there was Mr Puddy sitting up in his room sipping a cup of hot‐water with a pinch of bi‐carb. in it, and thinking about stirrup‐pumps.

  But Connie’s was the saddest case of all. Starting out rather late because she’d been retrimming her dress, she turned up in the wrong court. It was her fault, of course. Nobody else’s. It was simply that having seen Percy duly tried in No. 1 Court at the Old Bailey she had assumed that everything else to do with him would naturally go on there. And she had been wrong. The Lord Chief Justice was a bigger man than she had thought him. He didn’t go to trials, it seemed: trials went to him. So as soon as she had found out what was happening, she shot off in pursuit up to the Law Courts. But the traffic jam in Fleet Street was so bad that she had to walk. Run almost. And she knew from then on that it was touch and go. As it turned out, it was go. She got there just in time to see them all packing up, and the case over.