Ha'penny

by Jo Walton

  “Antony who?” Carmichael asked.

  Mercedes opened her big eyes wide. “Antony Bannon, the famous director,” she said.

  Jacobson sighed, clearly recognizing the name. “Did he offer her a part?” he asked.

  Mercedes looked over at him. “I don’t know. I didn’t see her afterwards. She said after I dressed her for lunch on Friday, she didn’t need me until Saturday evening. She had tickets for Glenn Miller at the Albert Hall.”

  GM, 8 P.M., Carmichael thought. “So you dressed her for her lunch, and then went off, and came back last night in time to dress her for Glenn Miller?”

  “Yes, but by then she was dead and wouldn’t need dressing again,” Mercedes said.

  “So you didn’t see her yesterday at all?”

  “No. The last time I saw her was on Friday morning. She got a taxi to Covent Garden, and I said, ‘Break a leg,’ meaning to wish her luck getting the part, you know. And she said, ‘Give my love to Gregory.’ Gregory being my friend I was seeing. And that’s the last time I ever saw her alive.” Mercedes wiped a tear from her eye with a little lace handkerchief.

  “Did you know the Greens had yesterday off?” Carmichael asked.

  “Yes, they always had Saturday. In the winter, Friday evening to Saturday, in the summer, all day Saturday. The Sabbath, you know? Mrs. Green always left cold food for me and Lauria, if she was eating in.”

  “Do you know what they do?”

  “They go to the synagogue, which is like church for them, and then they go to the house of a friend and do nothing. They really do nothing, they are obliged to, Mrs. Green told me. They can read, or talk, but they can do no work. Isn’t that amazing?” Mercedes’s expression showed that she clearly thought it little short of miraculous.

  “How long had they been with Miss Gilmore?” Carmichael asked.

  “Years and years. Since just after the war, I think. Mrs. Green was English; Jewish, but English. Mr. Green came from Holland when they threw away their Jews.”

  “Threw out, not threw away,” Carmichael corrected her gently. “Were they and Miss Gilmore close?”

  Mercedes stopped to consider. “In some ways close, in others not. She and I were more like friends, where with them they were always servants. But she treated me like a child to be indulged, whereas she took them much more seriously. She had been good to them too. She had helped Mr. Green with papers, as she did with me. Mrs. Green always says she didn’t know where she’d be without Lauria, and that she’d do anything for her. So I suppose they were close, yes.”

  “Do you know where they might be now? Mrs. Channing wouldn’t let them stay here, you know.”

  “That was very strange. At first, she didn’t mind, then afterwards she made a great fuss, shouting and raving.”

  Carmichael could imagine. And all faked. “Did they say where they were going?”

  “Not to me. But I suppose they would stay with friends,” Mercedes said. “Probably their friends from the synagogue.”

  “Do you know their name?”

  “I know some of their names. It wasn’t always the same family they visited. They had a lot of friends.”

  Royston took down the names, while Carmichael drew Jacobson over to the window. “Can you find out where these people live from the synagogue?” he asked. “Or from the station?”

  “It shouldn’t be a problem,” Jacobson said. “But if the Greens have anything to hide, they won’t be there.”

  Carmichael looked at Jacobson, wondering if he could be trusted. “Does Mrs. Channing know you know her husband was a Jew?” he asked.

  “If there’s an International Jewish Conspiracy, they threw me out years ago for not paying dues,” Jacobson said. “She knows. And she must therefore have expected me to back her up. I’d never do such a thing. I’m Jewish, certainly, but I never let that get in the way of doing my job.”

  9

  Malcolm kept piling me up with information about the terrible conditions in the Reich and I kept saying it was none of our business. If there was one thing the Farthing Peace had settled once and for all it was that the Continent was its own lookout. Why should I care what Hitler—or Pip for that matter—was doing to the Jews of Europe, even if I believed it? In fact, as I’d said to Siddy, I knew it was vastly exaggerated.

  At last he shook his head and looked at me. “Your upbringing was eccentric, to say the least, and I always felt sorry for you Larkin girls.”

  I drew myself up, not about to take that kind of thing.

  “No, listen,” he said, and because he was Malcolm and Uncle Phil’s companion and I’d always known him, I did listen. “If you’d been an ordinary family your parents would have been up in court for neglect, the way they let you grow wild. You’ve tried hard since to be something real, in the theater, I respect that. But your roots are in shallow soil, like all of your sisters. There’s no use saying you’ll always be a Larkin, as Phil does. I’m asking you not to be a Larkin but for once to be a decent human being and do the decent thing. We’re on a slippery slope. We’re well on down it. This could be the last chance for democracy, for liberty.”

  “You’re asking me to destroy the only thing that really matters to me, for something that isn’t even real,” I said. “I have my life, and my life has nothing to do with my duty to the country, to the Larkins, and certainly not to Humanity. My life is about theater. It always has been. What you want me to do, I see quite clearly now, is wreck a play, one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, to kill two politicians, who are probably only the tips of icebergs and can easily be replaced by others just as bad.”

  Seen in this light, the light of ages, the light of Art, I felt my position was unassailable. Malcolm’s arguments certainly couldn’t touch me.

  He sighed, and gave me his hand to help me up.

  When we came back out into the garden, everyone was sitting on the terrace as they had been before lunch. Malcolm looked over at Uncle Phil and gave a little shake of his head. Uncle Phil stared out over the roses. Siddy was gulping a cocktail, and smoking. She ignored me. She didn’t even look up. I suppressed the feeling that she was in trouble and needed me. I was furious with her. Ginns, indeed. What she needed me for, after all these years, was to die for her, putting a bomb in a box in the theater. There wouldn’t have been a dry eye in the house when they hanged me.

  “I think I’ll head back to London now,” I said, as brightly as I could manage.

  Loy began to rise from his chair. Devlin, beside him, put a hand on his leg, stopping him. “I’ll do it,” he said.

  “Are you sure?” Loy asked, raising his eyebrows. “I thought—”

  “You had the privilege of driving Miss Lark from the station this morning. Let me take care of this,” Devlin said. He smiled at me. I smiled back. I liked the fact that he called me Lark, instead of Larkin. Loy tossed him the keys.

  Uncle Phil and Malcolm shook my hand formally, a change from the hugs of this morning. Lieutenant Nash shook my hand too, but didn’t meet my eyes. Loy bowed over my hand, sardonic as ever. Siddy didn’t get up, she kept drawing on her cigarette and staring out over the ha-ha. “Good-bye then, Sid,” I said, as I went around the side of the house with Uncle Phil and Devlin.

  “She’s taking it hard,” Devlin said.

  “Go carefully,” Uncle Phil said.

  “I’m sorry, Uncle Phil,” I said. “But you can rely on my silence.” He pressed my hand. I got into the car.

  Devlin drove the car much more carefully than Loy. When we got to the end of the drive, he turned in the opposite direction. “I thought I’d take you to Maidstone,” he said, as I began to protest. “You’ll have a better choice of faster trains from there, than from Eskridge at this time on a Sunday.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  We didn’t talk for a while. Devlin’s big hands were confident on the wheel as he motored through the country lanes along the Downs. I saw wild roses in the hedgerows, much prettier than Uncle Phil’s rosebushes, bu
t on the whole I prefer my flowers made up as bouquets. We were held up behind a tractor going around a sharp corner, and then overtook it and went up a hill. Devlin pulled into a lay-by at the top of the rise, with Kent spreading out below us in a patchwork of greens. He switched the engine off, and it was very quiet. I could hear birds singing and the tractor laboring up the hill behind us.

  “Why are you stopping?” I asked.

  “We’re stopping because I can tell you’re a lovely girl really, and I want to talk to you.” He turned in his seat and smiled at me.

  I jumped to the obvious conclusion. “Oh honestly,” I said, exasperated. “I’d expect that sort of nonsense from Loy, but not from you.”

  “This isn’t what you’d have got from Loy,” he said, looking entirely sober now. “No, I reckon with Loy, you’d have got a much closer look at that corner back there than you’d have wanted, and probably ended up with your neck broken. That’s why I offered to drive you.”

  I didn’t quite know how to react to his slow voice saying this. “You mean Loy doesn’t drive safely?” I asked, though I had already understood. I was horrified to find my voice shaking.

  “He drives very well. Loy’s a professional, and so am I. Your uncle Phil now, he’s a nice man, a good man. He trusts you, and so does little Siddy. He tried to persuade you to help us out of your patriotic duty. And Malcolm, he tried to persuade you with facts and figures, and they’re all real enough, no doubt. And young Nash, if he’d had a go, he’d have tried with sob stories, and Lord knows there are enough sob stories. They’re good people, all of them. The best kind of English people. The kind of people you’d want running a country. Loy and I, we’re not nice people.”

  Not English either, though he didn’t have to say so, his voice made the point. I reached for the handle of the car door. Devlin put his hand on my arm. I didn’t struggle, but I could tell by the feel of his hand how strong he was. Oddly, perversely, there was an almost erotic charge in the warmth of his hand and the strength of it. “Let me go!” I said.

  “Let you go where, off into the farm country?” Devlin asked, quite gently. “Listen to me, Viola. We need you. I’m not threatening you, no, I’m not. Now I could, because we really can’t afford to let you go, knowing what you know and maybe being afraid, like your uncle says. But you know names and place and time, and that’s too much for you to know and for us to count on your word as a Larkin. I wouldn’t think your word as a Larkin would count for all that much, not when you’ve changed your name and all.”

  “You have no idea how much my word counts, you animal!” I said. His hand was still holding my arm, not squeezing or hurting me, but holding on to me so I couldn’t jump out of the car. He was right that there was nowhere to go. We were on top of the rise and there was nothing within running distance but fields, rolling away. All the farm buildings seemed far away and entirely out of reach.

  “No, that’s fair,” he said. “I don’t know. And I don’t think Siddy or Lord Scott really can know either. Loy wouldn’t be prepared to take the risk of letting you walk around knowing as much about us as you know, and I’m not sure he’s wrong. But I thought I’d take a chance that I could persuade you to help, if that was the choice.”

  “Dead blowing up tyrants or dead in a ditch?” I asked, sarcastically.

  “That’s about the weight of it,” he said.

  Poor Antony would think his Hamlet was doomed if I died before rehearsal as well as Lauria. The thought gave me strength. “You don’t dare,” I said. “It’ll draw too much attention to the production. Maybe Antony won’t even put it on if I’m killed. It would be clear it was jinxed. He’s very superstitious. You wouldn’t be able to kill Hitler if there’s no Hamlet to kill him in.”

  “He’ll still be going to the Wagner. That’s more dangerous, but it’s the fall-back plan. Loy wanted to go for that as soon as he heard. But Siddy thought it was fate, you being cast as Hamlet. She wanted to get in touch with you as soon as Lauria told her Antony was going to ask you.”

  “Fate!” I said. It was so exactly like Siddy. I could hear her saying it.

  “Well, fate it is now,” he said. He smiled at me. “Why did you come along?”

  “I thought Siddy was in some sort of trouble,” I admitted. “I thought it was real trouble, not all this nonsense.”

  Devlin stopped smiling. He took a breath, and let it out again. “Well,” he said. “At least you have some family feeling. That’s more to work with than if you were pure selfishness all the way through.”

  I had been terrified, but now I was furious. I just stared at him.

  “I’ve sisters myself,” he said, and he pulled me closer and gave me a most unsisterly kiss.

  My first reaction as he moved towards me was to pretend to like it. I’d been kissed often enough on the stage, I was sure I could fake a response. But it would be a lie to say it was entirely unwelcome. For one thing, like his hand on my arm, it was, however wrong it might be, charged, exciting. For another it was oddly reassuring. If he meant to kill me, surely he wouldn’t kiss me? At the same time I knew this was nonsense. Men raped women before killing them, never mind kissing them in a car. It wasn’t at all like a stage kiss. It was firm without being rough, gentle without being timid, just like Devlin himself.

  “Ah now, I shouldn’t have done that,” he said, as he moved away from me.

  There was a tiny smear of lipstick on the side of his face. I suppressed an urge to wipe it away. He had let go of my arm. I didn’t try to leap out of the car. “Because it will make it harder to kill me?” That was what I hoped, of course.

  “Because you’ll think I’m trying to seduce you into helping, and then you’ll think you can go along with that and tell the police everything after,” he said.

  I was affronted. “If that had been a possibility, don’t you think I’d have done that from the first moment? Agreed with Uncle Phil and then betrayed you? I gave my word. That might not mean anything to you, but it does to me.”

  “Ah, Viola,” he said. “I can’t trust you to keep quiet. I can’t. That option doesn’t exist, do you understand? I’ve seen too much in Ireland of people saying they won’t talk and then talking. Your options are what you said before, dead in a ditch or dead blowing up tyrants. And isn’t dead blowing up tyrants the better choice? For one thing, it doesn’t happen for near enough two weeks, and we can have some fun in that time, while dead in a ditch happens now, today. For another, it might not matter to you how you’re remembered after you’re dead, but if you die in a ditch you’ll be forgotten when the last person who saw your plays dies, and if you kill Hitler you’ll likely be remembered forever. For a third, well, that way you might not die at all. This way’s certain.”

  He had big capable hands, and blue eyes that always seemed to have a smile in the corner, and I couldn’t doubt that he’d kill me as competently and with as little fuss as he drove the car.

  “A fortnight . . .” I said, thinking for the first time about really doing it, really carrying a bomb into the Siddons. Being remembered for it didn’t excite me. It would cast a shadow over my career, the same way nobody remembers anything about Mata Hari except that she was a spy. But a fortnight more of life, and after that I might survive. And even if the bomb did wreck the play, it wasn’t the only play there would ever be, or even the only production of Hamlet there would ever be. “All right.”

  He didn’t smile. “You won’t be able to go home. We thought you could stay with Siddy . . .” He let the sentence trail, looking at me.

  The thought of turning back to Coltham and tamely saying I’d changed my mind, and then staying with Siddy, who knew her friends were taking me off to kill me and who hadn’t even got up to say good-bye, filled me with claustrophobia. “I have to learn my lines!” I said. “I have to learn my lines today. You might as well kill me here as brick me up with Siddy and expect me to be able to work. You can let me go home. If I don’t, Mollie and Mrs. Tring will worry and probably call t
he police. They might call the police even if I told them I was staying with Siddy, they’d think she kidnapped me.

  I’ll do it for you, Devlin, and I won’t talk, but you have to let me go home.”

  “You sound more desperate about that than about dying.” He raised an eyebrow, and looked skeptical.

  “Dying’s grand and noble, and terrifying in the abstract, but not really real; even when it’s about to become the dead in a ditch kind, death is an abstraction. Being shut up with Siddy is petty and appalling and all too well remembered,” I said, fervently.

  “You could stay with me,” he offered. “I could drive you home and you could collect your script and whatever you need, and you could tell your friends where you were going to be, that you were spending time with a man. Would that be so unusual?”

  “It would, actually, but they’d believe it much more readily, especially if you come in and wow them talking about Saint Joan,” I said. It took every ounce of stage skill to keep my voice even as I said this, because I suspected he was about to kiss me again, and indeed he did, as soon as I’d finished speaking.

  “I said we could have some fun together, and I think we could, don’t you?”

  He put his arm around me and held me against him. It didn’t have anything to do with love, it couldn’t, love was excluded from our relationship almost by definition. I’d always persuaded myself before that I was in love with anyone I felt like going to bed with, even if the love burned itself out as fast as the passion did. With Devlin there was never that illusion. He said he thought we could have some fun together, and I melted, I could hardly wait for decent privacy and a bed. Then, thinking about the night, I remembered. It was Sunday. “I still need to learn my lines. I need to learn my lines tonight!” I’d promised Antony I’d be word perfect by Monday morning.