The Itinerant Lodger

by David Nobbs

  “Oh. London.”

  “Which parts do you come from, sir?”

  “I—ouch.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Leeds and Margate and Barnstaple and the Isle of Wight.”

  “Oh. Those parts.”

  “Yes.”

  “You have to move around in your job, sir?”

  “It isn’t so much that.” He was fully undressed now. The constable, very embarrassed, looked him up and down and then began to shake all his clothes. “Some day I may settle down, when I’ve found what I’m looking for.”

  “You’re looking for something, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is it, sir? Buried treasure? X marks the spot?”

  “Ouch.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, it’s nothing like that.” There was a pause.

  “Anyway I hope you find it, sir,” said the constable.

  “Thank you. I hope so too.”

  “You can put your clothes on now, sir.”

  “Oh, thank you, officer.”

  “I really am very sorry, sir. I hope you weren’t too cold.”

  “Not at all. It just couldn’t be helped. Did you find anything?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No. sir.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I suppose it all depends what you’re looking for.”

  That must be it, thought the constable. Goodness knows what he was looking for though. They hadn’t told him that. Perhaps it was just as well, under the circumstances, that he’d found nothing.

  “Do you like your work?” Simpson asked, as he put on his socks.

  “No, sir. I regard it as an occupational hazard.”

  “How long have you been doing it?”

  “Nearly six months now, sir. It’s not too bad I suppose. There are moments when I quite enjoy it. Then at other times I begin to wonder. I mean, some of the things you have to do are pretty awful. Arrests, for instance. And whipping people to make them confess. You begin to wonder whether you’re cut out for the job. It’s not as if I had a calling for it.”

  “Well, officer, I wish you the best of luck anyway.” Simpson, fully dressed again, proffered his hand. The constable shook it. Then he began to blush again.

  “Are you ready, sir?” he asked.

  “Ready? Oh, of course. Just let me brush my hair.” Simpson brushed his hair and removed a few loose hairs from his jacket. “Right.”

  “You are charged,” read the constable, “that on the night of January 9 to 10 last in Corporation Street of this city you did wilfully, maliciously and without authority utter obscene documents and melodies, and also that at the same time and place you did wilfully and with malice aforethought park your wife, Esme Simpson, upon a bombed site, contrary to the Spouse Protection Act of 1623. You are further charged that on January 10 you did wilfully and maliciously kidnap with intent one Gertrude Walsh, of Thresher’s Farm, and did behave in a manner liable to cause a breach of promise.” Simpson went very white and sank into a chair. The constable put an arm on his shoulder. “I must warn you that everything you say will be taken down and may be used in evidence against you,” he said.

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Simpson sighed deeply, while the constable handcuffed him as gently as possible. They went to the bathroom together and the constable poured a glass of water, which Simpson drank. Then Simpson poured a glass of water, which the officer drank.

  They set off towards the police station then. All his life Simpson had summoned up ecstacy by clasping his hands together and exerting violent pressure upon them. Now all he wanted to do was to fling them apart. The pain of not being able to do so was almost insufferable in his arms and in his head.

  Suddenly the constable stopped.

  “That charge, sir,” he said. “I thought you said you weren’t married.”

  Simpson shrugged his shoulders. The constable shrugged his. But for the handcuffs they would have shrugged each other’s.

  “I thought I’d better mention it, sir,” said the constable.

  “That’s all right, officer.”

  “I’m sorry about all this, sir.”

  “So am I.”

  Their feet beat a muffled path upon the snow.

  “I’m sure it’ll turn out all right, sir,” said the constable.

  Chapter 13

  SIMPSON COULD FEEL NO GUILT. IT WAS AS IF THE crimes had been committed by some other man. He felt that if he could recall them he would be able to defend himself adequately, but he could not recall them. In the absence of any alternative defence he secured legal aid, and although his application for bail was refused—it appeared that he had a bad record—he had plenty of opportunity to confer with his lawyer, Mr C. T. Ackroyd.

  Mr Ackroyd was the son of old E. K. Ackroyd, the golfer, of Braithwaite, Ackroyd, and Clegg. He was a tall, cold-shouldered man, with an air of having cut his body to suit his cloth, and Simpson disliked him from the start. There was something unnatural about his manner.

  “Well now, my man, what’s all this?” he had begun. “Quite a night, eh? Been on the beer, had you? What were you celebrating? Managed to get a divorce or something? Ha ha ha, eh?”

  “I don’t remember a thing,” said Simpson coldly.

  “I shouldn’t think you would, in the state you must have been in. Ha ha ha ha ha, eh? Still, we aren’t here to discuss that.” He sat down on the hard chair which had been provided for him, and withdrew from his briefcase a wad of papers. “Now then, let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we?” he said in a manner slightly less hearty. “You’ll have to listen to what I say pretty carefully, and I want you to take care how you answer. All right? Good. We’re going to have to go pretty deep. It’s going to be a pretty deep case. Parkinson-Hoddinott will see to that. Likes to burrow, does Parkinson-Hoddinott. Great fellow. Played fives with his brother. But he’s deep. You have to be careful with him. Charming fellow socially, but he can be an absolute stinker in the courts. Ha ha ha, eh? It’s the Hoddinott in him coming out. They’re an old legal family. Old Augustus Hoddinott, the cricketer, slow left arm, prosecuted in the Barnsley Leather Satchel Case, when I was a student. But I didn’t come here to talk about that, did I? My point is, to handle old P.H. we’ve got to have our psychological stuff pretty well mapped out. He’s very fair on that side, old P.H. I don’t mind telling you, Simpson old man, that if we could prove that this whole show was pathological it would be a load off my mind.”

  Although Ackroyd did not mind telling him, Simpson appeared to mind being told. Throughout this address he had sat motionless, looking as pathological as he had ever done in his life. His expression did not suggest that it was a great load off his mind.

  “I think the thing to do is to delve around in your old subconscious,” went on Ackroyd. “After all, it sounds as though you were pretty well subconscious most of the time you were doing these things. Ha ha ha ha, eh?” Ackroyd paused, with the self-satisfied air of a man who has done his bit pretty adequately and can now wait for some comment to be passed. But Simpson, who had been given no chance of answering a series of questions which he had been forced to regard as rhetorical, did not reply. He would wait for a question demanding an answer, and until then he would hold his peace.

  “You won’t mind if I ask you a few questions, will you, old man?” asked Ackroyd.

  Simpson waited a moment, found that the question demanded an answer, and replied.

  “No,” he said.

  “They may seem pretty simple to you, but they’re important, so please answer carefully. O.K.?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good man. Right then, let’s fire away, shall we? Question number one. Where were you born?”

  “In Malmesbury.”

  “When?”

  “In 1925.”

  “Why?”

  “To discover the purpose of existence.”

  “Aha. That gi
ves us a bit of a line. Where did you go to school?”

  “Golden Lodge Preparatory School.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It wasn’t likeable.”

  “Then where did you go?”

  “Winchester.”

  “Were you happy there?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It wasn’t likeable.”

  “Did you ever wet your bed?”

  “Once.”

  “Where?”

  “In the Pay Corps.”

  “Did you get a commission?”

  “No.”

  “Were you ever inordinately fond of the wicket-keeper?”

  “Did you go to the university?”

  “Yes, Cambridge.”

  “Were you happy there?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I wanted to get out into the world.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you happy there?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It wasn’t a very nice world.”

  “Is abstract truth equatable with the ideals of the bourgeois?”

  “No.”

  “Name your favourite English town.”

  This, Simpson reflected, was what W.O.S.B. must have been like.

  “I haven’t one.”

  “Name any English town.”

  “I can’t decide which one to name.”

  “Name Kettering.”

  “Kettering.”

  “Who told you the facts of life?”

  “The school doctor.”

  “What happened?”

  “Wooldridge fainted.”

  “What profession did you take up when you left the university?”

  “Seismography, catering, journalism, teaching, bus conducting, typing….”

  “What are you now?”

  “Unemployed.”

  “Why did you leave all those jobs?”

  “I was sacked. They weren’t my vocation.”

  “What is?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Ha ha ha, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that gives me quite a lot to be going on. Now let’s turn to the events of the night of January 9th to 10th, shall we?” Much of the tension fell from the interrogation after this, since Simpson was so completely in the dark concerning the events of that night that it was not even necessary for him to be on his guard.

  “So you remember nothing of the evening in question at all?” Ackroyd asked at length, after fruitlessly attempting for several minutes to extract some information on the subject.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Have you seen a doctor recently?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was wrong with you?”

  “I don’t know. The treatment was confidential.”

  “I see. Well, thank you, Mr Simpson. We’ll have to see what we can do.”

  “Is there much hope?”

  “It matters to you, does it?”

  “Very much.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to be free again.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to discover the universal panacea for all mankind.”

  “I think there’s hope. I’ll work up a line of defence. I was interested in one or two things you said. Yes, I think there’s hope. Soon have you nicely settled in one of those asylums. Ha ha ha, eh?”

  Chapter 14

  DURING THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED SIMPSON BEGAN to feel that they had better not concentrate too fully on the medical side. He would rather admit the whole thing, and more besides. Luckily nobody thought to charge him with anything else.

  He began to have dreams of a world which was nothing but a vast asylum, in which there was nothing to do but sit on hard garden seats underneath yew trees or engage in interminable games of rehabilitative table tennis, which were always being interrupted by white-coated male nurses giving him his tea and rock cake at nineteen-all in the final set, so that nobody’s cure would be impaired. One night they even had him painting daffodils. He would wake up from these dreams to find stretched around him the damp walls of his cell, which magnified a thousand times the restless creaking of his rude bed. Tiny drops of sweat gathered on his skin and as he sat up suddenly in his terror they poured down his chest and forehead and tickled the hollows of his body. Then he would gradually realise that this was only one of Her Majesty’s prisons, and he was merely on remand. He would sink back onto his pillow then, in a travesty of relief, but the ache in his legs would not be relieved, and he would lie awake for the rest of the night, with the sweat drying cold on his body. Towards morning the relief would die away and the horror of the asylum would be as real to him in his wakefulness as it had been in his dreams.

  During these long sleepless nights he would desperately attempt to concoct some alternative line of defence, which did not rely on the medical approach. But it was difficult, as difficult as it would have been for him to concoct a prosecution. It struck him that he at least was assured of a fair trial. Perhaps, he thought with a flicker of martyred relish, he was the first man ever to be given one. For it is only when neither side knows anything whatsoever about the alleged incidents that a trial can possibly be fair. In so many trials the facts incline towards the guilt or innocence of the accused party before the proceedings have even been opened. If trials were to be fair, let them be held before, rather than after, the offence with which they were concerned, he thought.

  The calm which this thought engendered in him was abruptly shattered when he realised that there was no earthly reason, just because he knew nothing about the alleged incidents, why the prosecution should be equally ignorant. He was always the last to know about these things. Besides, as he saw now only too clearly, the fact that they were making allegations at all suggested that they had something up their sleeves. If they knew as little as he did they would be hard put to it to rustle up a prosecution. These thoughts caused Simpson renewed distress. When one party is in possession of the facts, and that party is not you, you have no chance whatever of a fair hearing. If there have to be facts at all, let them at least be shared equally among all the interested parties. He twisted his mind into agonies in his attempts to recall that fateful night, but all to no avail. It seemed impossible to defend oneself unless one knew exactly what it was one had not done, and if one had not done it it was very difficult to know what it was.

  The walls of the cell closed in on him during those days as if to press him like a fern. All over them little globules of sweat were spawning and constantly bursting, so that hundreds of tiny rivulets were forever running down the walls without managing to reach the floor.

  Where had he been on the night in question? Could he perhaps have been mistaken for somebody else? Hardly. He was the sort of person who could easily be mistaken for absolutely anybody, and indeed almost always was. But people who can be mistaken for absolutely anybody are very rarely mistaken for anybody in particular. Then why could he remember nothing? Even if he had been completely drunk throughout the whole affair, he must have begun to get drunk somewhere, and he must have been in surroundings of some sort when he sobered up.

  “Well, old boy, everything’s going swimmingly,” Ackroyd said to him one morning, on one of his regular but inconclusive visits. “There’s no need to worry at all. The doc. says he’s never seen a responsibility as diminished as yours. We’ll get you fixed up somewhere where you’ll be really well looked after. That’ll be nice, won’t it?”

  “But I’m innocent,” protested Simpson.

  “Yes, yes. I know all about that. It’s only natural.”

  “I’m innocent. If I only knew what had happened I could prove it.”

  “Of course you feel that way.”

  “I’ll plead guilty.”

  “What?”

  “I�
��ll plead guilty.”

  “You can’t do that, now we’ve got a defence.”

  “I’d rather plead guilty.”

  “But you said yourself that you were innocent.”

  “I don’t want to go into an asylum.”

  And then poor, harrassed Ackroyd, his heartiness vanished, had to explain, all over again, Simpson’s delusions. Of course he thought he was innocent. That was only to be expected. It is very hard to face up to the truth about oneself. But the fact that he wanted to plead guilty revealed, whatever explanations of it he might give, that on a subconscious level he was aware of his guilt. Of course it would be nice to spend a year or two in prison, and then be free. Everybody knew that. But what was nice wasn’t always what was best for us. We couldn’t always do what we wanted in this world. It was a pity, but there it was. That was what life was like. We had to accept it, whether we liked it or not. And we didn’t always know ourselves what was best for us. Ackroyd always knew what was best for us. Ackroyd knew that it was his duty to see that Simpson was protected from society.

  Simpson pointed out to him that in law a man is guilty until he is proved insane, but it was no use. Ackroyd’s case was made up. They were dark days. The trial grew steadily nearer, and so settled was everything in Ackroyd’s mind that he no longer even bothered to visit his client. Simpson was feeling at his lowest ebb, when, on the day before the trial, he had what was perhaps the first stroke of luck that he had ever enjoyed. A pleasant, unassuming, friendly and gently-spoken man, with grey hair and lines on his forehead, appeared at the door, and announced that his name was Mr Burbage, and he was Simpson’s new lawyer. Ackroyd, whose intention it was to visit connections in the tropics before the winter was out, had fallen seriously ill with antitetanus injections.

  “I see that the defence is one of diminished responsibility,” said Mr Burbage, having removed from his briefcase a bottle of claret and two glasses.

  “A glass of wine?”

  “Thank you.”

  Mr Burbage poured out the wine.

  “I’m innocent.”

  “What?”

  “It was Ackroyd’s idea. He said he’d get me into an asylum.”

  “And you agreed?”

  “I had no say in the matter.”