A Long Walk to Wimbledon

by H. R. F. Keating

  The Rev, coming striding up the narrow aisle in the centre of the big room, was tall, probably an inch or more over six feet, and the striking effect of his height was sharply accentuated by the fact that he was almost completely bald. Only a fringe of black hair, a little long and untidy, grew at the back of the high gleaming skull that looked, as he headed swiftly towards them, like a tall polished ivory helmet. Beneath it was a long face, cleanshaven to glistening point, with a prominent prow-like jaw and a pair of light grey eyes darting almost feverishly from side to side.

  He reached the blanket-covered desk, went round behind it, stood for a moment looking at the three of them – Mark brought up his gaze to face him, but only with an immense effort – and then sat down and cleared his throat so loudly and deliberately that he might have been issuing a statement.

  ‘Be seated. Court is in session.’

  Mr Lillimass’s shout was followed by a prolonged, gradually dying clatter as the spectators took their seats again. Mark felt himself tapped on the shoulder by the guard standing behind his chair and subsided into it. In front of him the Rev waited in distant silence till every last sound had ceased. Then he gave another of his deliberate high-pitched throat clearings that seemed to say as much as a whole sentence.

  ‘My friends.’

  The bright grey eyes flickered across the dense packed rows of onlookers.

  ‘We are here today to see justice done. Here at least, in this community of ours, we have freed ourselves from the terrible errors that brought chaos, no less, to the world that we once knew. Here at least we recognise truth, and we bow down before it. Here we put justice in her proper place, high and holy above the crawling considerations of the weak who did not dare to mete out due punishment from craven fear that they in their turn might have punishment meted out to them. My friends, you will not here today have to endure hearing a squirming mess of psychiatrists telling you that the wicked are not wicked. You will not have to hear a paid and vile lawyer pretend that a wrong committed has not even taken place. Here you will see justice done. Pure justice. And simple justice.’

  The pale eyes under the ivory skull helmet came back to look at each one of them in turn.

  ‘It is because we are here to see justice done,’ the high clear voice went on, ‘that I have ordered this trial to take place before the end of our usual working day. I will not tolerate those who are aged among us losing one of the pleasures of their declining years just for the sake of a pack of wild and evil men. And, since it is proper also that any sentence be carried out with the least possible delay, I have directed that the trial should start early enough to be completed before daylight fails.’

  And with those last three words, spoken with even extra emphasis, he turned again to the eager spectators. To be rewarded with a long ‘Aah’ of satisfaction.

  Mark knew at once why it had come. A verdict that needed daylight in order to be carried out meant beyond doubt a sentence of death by shooting. Penny had said that this was what they would do, and that gasp of pleasure from the onlookers confirmed it.

  This was not a trial at all. It was a ritual conviction ceremony, a gathering for the purpose of killing Dr Satpathi. Of killing him and first glorying in it.

  He found the idea impossible to comprehend.

  ‘Mr Lillimass,’ the Rev called out in his high-pitched voice. ‘Would you give us the charges?’

  Mr Lillimass, who had taken a seat reserved for him in the front rank, bounced to his feet and stood at fierce attention, face under the slicked-down neat grey hair visibly going from heated crimson to bluey purple. Mr Litmus.

  He produced from his pocket a sheet of paper – more paper – and, taking a deep gulp of breath, read in a noisy drone.

  ‘In the case of the first two accused: that they did intrude upon and despoil the true peace of the inhabitants of the Regent’s Park Estate without lawful cause. In the case of the third accused: that he did intrude upon and despoil the said peace, being not a freeborn subject of His Majesty.’

  Again from the spectators came a single indrawn hiss of hate-filled satisfaction.

  Mark found himself doubting his ears. That these people should accuse them without even bothering to find out their names, as if they were so much punishment fodder, two white and therefore automatically ‘true born subjects of His Majesty’ and one brown-skinned and therefore as automatically faced with a death sentence. And ‘His Majesty’? Were they really invoking the King of England as some fantastic justification for their loosed hatred? The King, wherever he was now. In Australia or somewhere when he had last heard. Did they believe the King’s writ still ran in the ruleless world outside? No, of course, they did not. All they wanted was that ring of officialdom, a pretence that a whole locked and interlinked system of laws still rose above them.

  Let them have their pretences. There was nothing to be done now. They were going to kill poor harmless Dr Satpathi as soon as they had finished here. They were in all probability going to make Brian Parkinson and himself into galley-slaves on their damned bikes. Or … Or were they too going to be sentenced to death? No. No.

  What had he kept himself alive for in all these last years when just keeping alive had been almost too much for him? To be shot to give these people their nasty pleasure? No. No. No.

  Rage shifted and stirred down in the bottom of his mind.

  In front of him the Rev cleared his throat again. The high pellucid sound.

  ‘Very good. Now we shall need a witness. Is there someone?’

  ‘Yes, please, sir.’

  It was the portly man who had so resented having to come down from the rooftop when they had been captured. Without his long greatcoat he had not recognised him sitting in the front row.

  ‘Very well. Just tell us in your own words what you saw.’

  ‘I was on duty at the arch leading out to Hampstead Road, your reverence. I saw these people making their way along the road, though from where I was up on the roof I couldn’t see that one of them was a trop. Otherwise I might have put a round into him.’

  ‘Quite so, quite so. Go on, though.’

  ‘Well. Then, for no reason at all so far’s I could see, they all three of ‘em turned and made a dash in under the arch.’

  The damned liar. Not a word about Penny nearly escaping. Wants to keep his nose clean, of course.

  Rage jerked about in his mind. But the Rev was speaking again.

  ‘Yes. We have heard quite enough. They wilfully made their way in. The case is proved.’

  The pale eyes under the ivory dome of the helmet skull brightened. He was about to pass sentence.

  Mark turned his head away. To look anywhere. Anywhere rather than take even a passive part in this nastiness. His gaze hit on the big double-columned board of rules. He forced himself to read them, to blot out the sound of the farce.

  1 Tenants are not to leave the bounds of the Estate except in regular working parties under supervision.

  2 Lights Out is at 8 p.m. in Winter and 10 p.m. in Summer. Tenants are forbidden to leave their flats after these times.

  3 Male Tenants and Female Tenants above the age of –

  But he could not keep out the sound of that high-pitched perfectly clear voice allocating to him his fate.

  ‘… guilty of an altogether unwarranted crime, and I have no hesitation in sentencing you both to two months hard labour, at the end of which time you will be given the alternatives of either joining this community and learning to live decent lives or of expulsion.’

  So he was not to be shot. But it was to be imprisonment here, for two whole months. And Jasmine would die tomorrow. At round about noon, or a little later if Tommy’s expensive potion was more effective than he had guaranteed. And Dr Satpathi was going to be condemned equally, but to die, as surely as if the final ravages of cancer were eating at this instant his inmost flesh.

  Not to hear that sentence pronounced.

  He flung himself round to the board of ridiculous rule
s and started to read them again with all the force of concentration he could summon up.

  6 Female Tenants and Kiddies under the age of 12 are for-bidden to use offensive language of any kind.

  7 No spiritous liquor is to be manufactured or drunk. Beer will be provided when available for Male Tenants over the age of 21.

  8 All Boys over five years are to take part in daily sport, except on Sundays.

  9 Every Male Tenant is entitled to one week’s holiday per year, that holiday to be taken upon the premises.

  … to be shot.’

  These words had penetrated, as he had known they would.

  The swirling rage burst tumultuously out.

  ‘No!’

  A breath-wrenching jerk across his neck made him aware that, without being conscious at all of doing anything, he had leapt forward three-quarters of the way across the gap to the ivory-helmet figure of the Rev behind the desk, hands seeking a throat. But he had been stopped. A lunging grasp at his collar from behind had brought him up short. And now in front he saw two long rows of buttons glinting down a khaki greatcoat, a face contorted with rage or effort and a long smooth pale-coloured club lifted high.

  It struck him full across the face.

  For two instants he seemed to feel nothing. Then a streak of raw pain ran down from forehead to cheek, to mouth, to chin. And he could sense existence shrinking inwards as the long club rose and descended again and again, each time more dimly apprehended. And the peripheral awareness that Brian Parkinson, too, was engaged in a struggle.

  But soon he lost all sense of what was happening until at some later time, perhaps only a few minutes, perhaps longer, he regained his senses somewhere outside to feel brutal hands gripping his upper arms frogmarching him along. The air was healingly cold on his face. Ahead, he realised, the battle-bloused figure of Brian Parkinson was being similarly manhandled. And, as his brain cleared a degree more, he glimpsed yet further in front Dr Satpathi sedately walking between two more tall greatcoated shapes. And almost at the same moment a violent smell of aniseed invaded his nostrils.

  For a little, feet dragging and stumbling, shoulders painfully wrenched, he puzzled over this. Could it be some hallucination caused by the beating-up he must have had? But why aniseed? Aniseed?

  Then, with the effect of a loose ball neatly dropping into its hole, he knew. Absurd. The Pernod bottle in his coat pocket had been smashed. He could feel now a sticky trickle down his leg and even hear a muffled clinking from the glass.

  Jasmine. She would never drink her precious Pernod now. And she would never see him, never say to him the words oncoming death had brought her to want to say, never hear from him the answer she hoped for. Jasmine. Wife, wife, bane of my life.

  ‘Party, halt.’

  A hoarsely shouted order.

  He experienced abruptly a feeling of familiarity. He had been here before. But that could not be.

  Then: Yes, it could. It was the football area they had been escorted past in the morning, the sunken asphalted playground surrounded by walls five feet deep where the compulsory sport for boys must take place. The little crowd of very young spectators had been assembled just where the party of them were now, and one of the mothers had threatened cheerfully to smack her child for not paying attention.

  He saw that they were leading Dr Satpathi away. They took him down a flight of brick steps that gave access to the asphalt pitch. Mr Lillimass was in charge. And a little further along from them the tall figure of the Rev was standing at the very edge of the wall, a faint waft of breeze in the cold dusky air moving a little the longish lank black hair that fringed his ivory helmet of a skull.

  The guards holding him pushed him forwards now so that he too was at the edge of the wall. Where he could get an uninterrupted view. He watched dully as Dr Satpathi – unprotesting – was led across to the far end of the pitch where the white outline of a goal had been painted on the brickwork. When the small party reached the spot some fumbling manoeuvres took place and then the escorts stepped back and it became apparent that Dr Satpathi’s hands had been secured to the wall, to some metal ring or staple.

  It was still now but just as cold, and the light was draining away.

  ‘Listen.’

  He half turned at the hissed word. It was Brian Parkinson, who had been pushed up beside him, another privileged spectator.

  ‘Don’t look at me. Just listen.’

  The words were clearly audible, but he did not feel obliged to pay them any attention. Down there they were on the point of blotting out utterly innocent Dr Satpathi and all his store of long-garnered earth-planted tales. In a few moments it would be done. Nothing could stop it. And afterwards the two of them would be taken off and tomorrow when he should be reaching that little pebbledashed house in Wimbledon they would be turning the pedals of bicycles harnessed to heavy generators so that there could be another film show here, perhaps this time for ‘the kiddies’. Why should he listen?

  ‘Listen. We’re going to make a break for it. When they’re all glued to that. When I shout “Now” you turn and belt like hell after me. Okay?’

  He did not answer.

  The sheer idiot. They were not going to be allowed just to get away. Any more than anything was going to stop Dr Satpathi being shot.

  ‘Firing squad, take aim.’

  Down below, Mr Lillimass was standing to one side, very upright, very much at attention, and the three men of the firing squad, armed with no more than revolvers – but revolvers would be enough – were in position some fifteen feet in front of Dr Satpathi’s chained figure. Now they raised their weapons, held double-handed, very carefully to eye level.

  He thought he could make out on the lightish bricks behind the small self-contained Indian old dark dried splashes.

  ‘Squad, fire.’

  Three shots cracked and reverberated almost simultaneously in the cold dim air. Little Dr Satpathi jerked as if a single spasm of electricity had gone through him and keeled straight over.

  ‘Now.’

  And at the barked word in his ear, without knowing what he was doing, he simply obeyed the earlier harshly whispered instructions. He swung straight round. He began to run. Nobody made any attempt to stop him. Eyes fastened greedily on that sad keeled-over sack between the painted goalposts, no one was at that moment conscious of anything else.

  Ahead, he saw Brian Parkinson’s bulky battle-bloused shape racing sturdily into the gloom. He let himself be drawn after it, matching his stride unwittingly to the pounding steps in front.

  He had no idea where they were going. Would Brian Parkinson have remembered their zigzagging route of the morning enough to get them back to the exit arch? Perhaps. He ought to be the sort of person who would.

  They ran on. In the slowly closing cold dusk there seemed to be no one to see them. All at the execution, no doubt. There had been a lot of people, dark and massed, on the opposite side, far more even than those crammed in at the trial.

  Suddenly he felt an intense jabbing pain in his side. It brought tears to his eyes. He told himself he could not go a step further. But his legs slogged on for him. And then, rounding a corner, there was the courtyard that lay immediately inside the Estate with behind it the archway into Hampstead Road.

  They would get out.

  ‘Halt. Who goes there?’

  A man appeared at the side of the arch, fifteen yards or so away. He had a shotgun levelled at them at waist height.

  Brian Parkinson scarcely wavered. One half-check in his stride and then he was plunging forward straight at the man with the gun.

  Mark followed, part wanting to swerve out of the line of fire, part wanting to fling himself to the ground and stay there for ever, part assenting to Brian Parkinson’s way.

  ‘Stop. Stop, I’ll shoot.’

  That was a panic voice. Would they bulldoze the fellow into not pulling that trigger until it was too late?

  He found in himself a quarter ounce more energy and caught up a
little on the battering battle-smocked figure directly ahead.

  And then came the splat of the shotgun. He heard stray pellets scoring the asphalt. And Brian Parkinson tottered.

  ‘Help. Help. Help.’

  The man with the gun was yelling at the top of his voice.

  Brian Parkinson was still eight or nine yards away from him. The gun was a double-barrelled one. The second shot could scarcely fail to wound him terribly. From inside the empty building behind more loud voices were coming in answer.

  Brian Parkinson wheeled suddenly away.

  Mark, a mother-fixated duckling, plunged off after him. They ran into another darkened courtyard. No more shots came, but there were shouts and yelled orders. A third courtyard appeared in front of them, its centre a garden surrounded by neat hedges.

  Abruptly Brian Parkinson threw himself over the nearest hedge and flat on to the ground in its shadow. Mark, in his wake, failed to jump high enough and found himself so caught in the thin branches of the hedge, all motivation drained away, that he thought he would simply hang there till he was picked up. But the sheer weight of his body caused him to fall through and end lying in line with and behind Brian Parkinson’s heavily panting form.

  Almost at once he heard voices, and though they were questioning and unsure of themselves he locked hard with fear. Out of the edge of his vision, as he kept his face plunged into the frost-hard chunky earth of the hedge bottom, he glimpsed lights. The thin hard beams of torches. He forced himself to stop breathing. But the noise of his heart thudding, of the pounding in his ears, could not be stopped.

  He became conscious of the odour of aniseed from the still wet patches on his burberry and trousers. If the searchers happened to come along the path on the other side of the hedge, wouldn’t they smell him out?

  ‘All clear here. Come along. They won’t get out, whatever they do.’

  From the murmur of voices one had sounded clear and authoritative. There came the sound of mingled steps moving away. And then silence.