Deep Sleep

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘Six-forty-five. Or quarter to seven, whatever you prefer.’ He was laughing again, seemed incredibly happy.

  ‘I’d better go and see if Mummy’s back, then. She might …’

  ‘Oh might she? Yes I suppose she might … Your mother … your mother is a wonderful girl, you know.’ The voice was now thick with emotion. ‘Tell her … Tell her, oh never mind.’ He was suddenly back to his more familiar self. ‘Anyway, come back if she isn’t there. Can’t have you wandering round on your own, can we?’

  Tombo was beginning to think this might be preferable. With all the uninhibited instincts of his age, he was aware, where Mummy was not, of Mister’s funny, grown-up, silly regard for her, the way his eyes followed her in the shop when she was not looking and Tombo was in there, waiting on his seat by the counter where he had felt safest with Mrs Carlton, even when she was at her worst.

  He did not analyse any of this but the defection of little Mrs Carlton through death made him angry with her: some form of safety went with her. Tom was also angry with Mummy who would, surely, if left alone, make friends with Daddy again. She had told him, categorically and often, that they were friends, really, Daddy and she, just not the kind of friends who should live under the same roof. ‘You know how it is, pet; some people you like, but you can’t be with them all the time. You’ve got friends like that in school.’ Had he hell: the likening of his own situation to theirs brought resentment without a glimmer of understanding. Tombo was more used to yearning for friends: he could not imagine the luxury of turning them away; he could not even turn Daniel away, and if Mister here, with his great, wide, soppy smile and his glittering eyes … if this Mister thought he was going to step in where Daddy had stepped out, he had another think coming. Tombo slithered off his seat.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said very formally. ‘Thanks for letting me in.’

  ‘Any time, old son.’ Watching him for two steps, waving blearily.

  Old son, new son, I am not your son, you, you stinker: you don’t care about me at all. Tombo dawdled in the yard, hoping that the longer he took, the greater would be the chance of light in the upstairs flat. He paused by the wall, half-hiding, aping the game of hide and seek he had so recently escaped, peering round the broken fence although he did not expect discovery. Then, from just beyond the wall, he saw the tail lights of a parked car flutter into life, slightly ahead and parallel with the back of the baker’s, two doors down, but close. An engine choked softly and began to purr: he recognised the familiar sound in one great bound of joy, ran from his sheltering place, shrieking after the lights and the puff of exhaust, ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy! Dad, it’s me, stop … Dad … stop …’ But it was too late. He ran after the car up to the junction at the end, where it slowed, turned, too dark for the driver to see behind, leaving Tombo, standing still, shaking his fist and crying.

  He wiped his hand across his nose. Traces of chocolate clung like mud, mingling with the tears.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘YOU are old, you are old … And your bones are growing cold …’

  Old. Nearing seventy, facing the vacuum of an evening in a hospital room assigned for his use. Oh, Father William, you are old, and you hide your depression in a cold. The softest pair of hands, most catholic of knowledge, such talent in finding a vein, but nothing to do with all those hours before sleep. Dr Hazel was overly familiar with despair. His right hand stretched out for the brandy bottle beside his bed: then the left hand followed the right and slapped his own wrist. He squinted at the red mark he had made, faintly visible below the age marks on white skin. No.

  As long as he stayed overnight in the room, he might be needed or entertained. Hospitals breathed by night: there were generators and footsteps, life and crises instead of the sterile death of empty rooms in an empty home. No one asked him to stay and look in on his patients, but he stayed. On the desk at home was paper, pen, the constant reproach of all he had meant to write and could not write. The same reproach lingered here, but not as pressing. No. Not the brandy. A lifetime’s acquaintance with the unconscious patient left him prey to an inverted view of human kind: cynical depression was the curse of his existence. So much so, there was discomfort in the finding of an occasional kindred spirit who whetted that appetite for life he had been trying to kill, and awakened his talent to amuse and inform. He was not grateful to Helen West.

  ‘Dear God,’ he muttered, folding his hands in mockery of prayer. ‘Will someone, somewhere, give me something useful to do? Rancid, I am, with stale knowledge and old clothes.’

  The jacket had thirty years, cavalry twills twenty, outmoded like many of his drugs, only the fingers superbly useful.

  Retirement, the blackest gift of his seventieth birthday, yawned like a black hole and suicide beckoned less as a sin against the Holy Ghost than as the exchange of one hell for another. He picked up his pen and felt it freeze in his fingers. No one would want to know. He eyed the medicine cabinet in the corner, which, being his own, was never checked. A few drops of this and that, oblivion so easy. Again, no. He had his pride, although he despised it. His wife and son stared out from the photograph fading by the sink. Dead, buried along with his own dignity and reputation.

  A little of the brandy, perhaps. Only a little.

  Helen knew she was better. Familiar energy was returning to her limbs; she had ticked her way through two days in the office and one very awkward interview with the Chief Inspector in the Carlton enquiry, but recovery was reliably signalled by preparations for an evening out with friends and the beginnings of an argument with Bailey. Understated arguments were frequent preludes to such occasions. Bailey only liked parties after they were finished, had fond memories of some, and actually loved conversation, but getting him out there was not always easy. What irritated Helen was the fact that the sociable part of their not very sociable lives was invariably initiated by her, never by him. He had no conscience about refusing invitations, nor did he aspire to the kind of acquaintance she seemed to attract without effort. Taking Bailey out to dinner with others was an activity she compared with leading out a dancing bear on a chain; he grumbled and snarled slightly, grizzled, but followed and once there, found himself baited.

  ‘I like that. You look good.’ Helen’s dress always pleased him; he took a rare interest in her clothes, would have encouraged even greater flamboyance than she ever allowed herself in the plain lines and strong colours of her choice. He was proud of her, liked others to see her, but he never said so, of course.

  ‘So do you. You always do. Handsome. If a little formal.’ There was no sarcasm in the words, only a familiar teasing. Bailey could not master casual clothing. There were suits and other uniforms for work; then there were frayed jeans and shirts for carpentry, gardening or mending drains, but nothing in between. Helen liked to see his long, lean frame adorned by a suit, and it did not matter what others chose.

  ‘By the way,’ she continued from no beginning, ‘do you know a Chief Inspector Davies? On your division, not your station.’

  ‘Yes, vaguely. He doesn’t report to me. Nice man. Not made for higher things and doesn’t want them. Collects teapots.’

  ‘Oh, does he? Might have liked him better if I’d known that. He came into the office yesterday: we had a bit of an argument about that Carlton death, you know the chemist near you. He thought I was telling him how to do his job.’

  Bailey frowned, a look of real annoyance replacing the resignation which had been present a minute before. He picked the car keys from the top of the fridge, where a large dish contained every spare item, bills included, which lingered, sometimes for weeks, in Helen’s home, waiting for a place to rest. ‘Well … were you telling him how to do his job?’

  ‘Not as I saw it,’ said Helen, feeling round in the dish for the house keys which also lived there, assuming a life of their own whenever she needed them. ‘But he just wasn’t interested. I was telling him I thought we needed another post-mortem, household stuff analysed to see if there was
any more chloroform around, and a lot more background detail into the drug as well as the family before we could say that this damn chemist’s wife really had died without any explanation. A good look at the shop. Stuff like that. Re-interview the woman assistant …’ Her voice had assumed that airy quality which meant she recognised some form of criticism from him was on the way. Helen wanted to circumvent that: it boded ill for an evening already fraught with pitfalls, but she knew she was too late. Bailey did not understand blind loyalty – he belonged to no tribe, policemen or otherwise – but something in him rebelled against hearing a colleague being criticised. Strangers could do so, newspapers did so all the time, but not, please, his nearest and dearest.

  ‘Listen, he’s a Chief Inspector doing his best. They have the worst of all worlds, poor bastards, all the administrative nightmares, almost everything routine to investigate, hit and run, unexplained death, with none of the facilities given to the CID. You have to let him do the best he can and accept the result. If you interfere, you’ll make it worse. He has a healthy attitude to lawyers, anyway.’

  ‘Meaning we’re really congenital idiots who know nothing about the real world? Sit in judgement like gods on the universe and never get our hands dirty? Yes, that is what you mean.’

  ‘No, not what I mean, but what he might mean, especially if you dictate to him. Neither party does a perfect job, but the one shouldn’t interfere with the other.’

  ‘I thought I’d ask Dr Hazel, you know, my anaesthetist, for some help on the subject. What am I supposed to do, let it ride?’

  ‘In some cases, yes, unless you have excellent reasons to say you shouldn’t. Which you haven’t here. There’s no real suggestion of murder or manslaughter, any more than there is in death by glue sniffing. Helen West’s insatiable curiosity is about to request the invasion of some poor citizen’s privacy. Nothing to do with evidence, of course. And enlisting the aid of a deeply suspicious old man in the process.’

  She did not leap to the good doctor’s defence: that way lay serious argument, but she was uncomfortable. There was no evidence of foul play, rather the reverse, plenty to indicate nothing of the kind. Only the smells, the shameful scent of a wild goose chase and the wonder how anyone could bear the perfume of drugs without overdose first. She felt slightly ashamed as her hands closed over the keys.

  ‘You wouldn’t be able to have a placatory word with Chief Inspector Davies, would you? Put him on the amenable track, since you know him, smooth the hackles?’

  ‘Helen,’ he said warningly. ‘You know I won’t.’

  ‘OK, OK, leave it for now, sorry I spoke.’ She deflected serious irritation by pulling at his sleeve, ‘Come on, we’re late.’

  Late for an evening of good food, multicoloured salad and veal escalope which he enjoyed, conversational jousting with him as the target, which he did not. It only needed one liberal bounty hunter who believed the whole order of police officers was rife with corruption to lead a pack of interrogators, primed with the questions they had always wanted to ask. There was a dentist, three lawyers, a magazine journalist, not an abnormal throng for a dinner party. Helen, knowing he was far from defenceless and angry with him anyway, left him to the wolves at the other end of the table.

  ‘No,’ he was repeating wearily, ‘no, I don’t think London’s policemen are particularly more wonderful than any other men: they do what other men do, think what other men think, are tempted in the same way by the same things.’

  ‘Have you ever,’ asked one intense woman, ‘ever lost your temper, and you know, oh, I hope you don’t mind being asked this, I mean, ever beaten someone, hit them? When you were arresting them, I mean,’ she added hastily.

  ‘I do mind being asked.’ Bailey’s voice was sharper, alerting Helen from her distance. ‘But since you have, the answer’s yes. Without much real excuse either. Not for some time, however. Hot temper goes hand in hand with youth, but also has an occasional association with courage. Difficult, in awkward situations, to have the one without the other.’ He smiled at the woman like a piranha, making her duck back into her food, Bailey’s most dreadful and terrifying smile, not deterring the man opposite. Oh, Christ, Helen thought; this was not one of the evenings worth leaving a fireside for, even to avoid cooking. She knew very well by the end of the second course that they would depart as soon as decency allowed, looked round at her own contemporaries. Better educated than Bailey, despite his law degree, painfully acquired through night school; better read for all his voracious reading; better mannered, certainly not. Bailey would not dream of harassing a fellow guest. In his case, disapproval bred silence, so did uncertainty, and no serious conversation was ever so public, so rudely monopolising. It was not his fault that despite his erudition he so often resembled a bull in a china shop. She was proud of him, loved him, but occasionally, they embarrassed each other.

  Finding the safety of the car after they left the house and in the certain knowledge of being talked about, Helen wondered if it would ever end, this social awkwardness. Probably not.

  ‘Your place or mine?’ he asked, the ordinary smile which creased the face into a thousand lines showing relief at the end of captivity.

  ‘Any home at all, James, and don’t spare the horses.’

  Philip Carlton’s late wife Margaret had never actually disgraced him in public, but, as he saw it, she had never actually raised his stock either. I mean, he told himself, in the privacy of his spotless kitchen, allowing himself a little of her favourite tipple although it was slightly sour from the keeping, she wasn’t an asset. Pip scarcely noticed the taste, bought wine automatically the same way he consumed one glass each evening alongside carefully prepared food. One pork chop, two vegetables, one small baked potato, efforts the women in the grocer’s and the butcher’s found commendably sad and brave. Almost as swift to commend and sympathise was that Chief Inspector who had phoned in the first place to say that Margaret was dead. Sympathy had diminished with the discovery of the chloroform angle, ebbed and flowed since, but he seemed to accept Pip’s apologetic explanations. Besides, the chemist’s drugs were all in order, not a single poison unaccounted for, the records immaculate, and although the telephone voice was clipped, it was still reassuring. Pip remembered how he had kept them out of the back dispensary.

  ‘Sorry to bother you, Mr Carlton. I said I’d come back to you about the … funeral arrangements.’ He had been going to say, about your wife’s body, but changed the words instead. Chief Inspector Davies loved his own wife solidly; he imagined most respectable men did the same, despite the evidence to the contrary often shoved in front of his nose. Besides, any one of the few questioned in Herringbone Parade (a sketchy questioning, he had to admit) found Philip Carlton wonderful. That, with the Inspector’s naive belief in the integrity of professional men, put him firmly on Pip’s side. Women, on the other hand, were always difficult.

  ‘But anyway, as I said, we can’t release the … deceased, not yet. And another officer might see you tomorrow. Detective Inspector Collins. I’m off the case.’

  ‘Why?’ said Pip.

  ‘Well,’ said Davies uncomfortably, ‘I had to report to the Crown Prosecution Service. We do, you see. It’s them, not me: they want a few more enquiries. That chloroform, bloody nuisance. Silly of her to play round like that.’

  People dying in bed were a burden for a desk already full of death and disaster mainly inflicted by motor cars. ‘Nothing to worry about, the Coroner’s doing his pieces, but there it is. Shouldn’t take long. Only a matter of loose ends.’

  ‘Can you bring back the things you took from the flat?’

  There was a pause. ‘No, not yet, sir, but please don’t worry. He’ll see you at twelve, OK?’

  Pip was not worried, or not more than a jot. If they asked him more questions, he would only have to give them more answers since he had nothing to lose apart from the sympathy of another police officer. No one had yet asked for any elaboration, but he had never really supposed it was goin
g to be as easy as that. What he and Margaret had done so often last thing at night might be considered odd, but hardly criminal. You would only have to look at a photograph of Margaret to see why. In any event, the entertainments of the evening had rendered him languid, full of confidence and bonhomie, and he was well on the way to believing that everything had been Margaret’s fault anyhow. Bossy, officious, little Margaret with the lined monkey face and shattering voice, with her pathetic passion to be loved. Not quite as well off or as amenable as he had thought, this Margaret, owner of this freehold shop, all left by her dead husband. They had added this respectable wealth to the price of the house left by his mother when Pip entered into marriage for the first time. Margaret’s fault too, if the glow had faded; she should not have been so bossy, so anxious to interfere with everything. He dwelt on this, working himself into righteous anger. It saved him from dwelling on the other. The shame, the hot, searing shame which pierced his groin as he sat in the kitchen, his hand moving automatically to guard his crotch. Small and perfectly formed, his mother had said, touching all the time and teasing. Alone and afraid, he could feel her fingers again, flicking and tickling his childish little stump, teasing him into life, that awful, disgraceful, involuntary life which Margaret had so craved.

  He could feel the fingers. Pip suddenly screamed in agony. Sat back with his knees pressed close together, rocking to and fro until he was calmer, waited for the sweat to cool, still feeling hands along his spine and between his legs, creeping like insects. There was a knock on the door. His head shot up, the neat hair fell back into place and colour returned to his skin. Outside, Daniel was halfway down the steps. Daniel never waited.

  ‘Oh. I was coming to see you. Heard you shout. Those boxes out the back …’

  ‘No,’ said Pip. ‘Not now, tomorrow. It’s late.’

  ‘OK.’ Daniel shrugged. A sly smile curved at his mouth, not a particularly pleasant smile. ‘Don’t want anyone going near your back room, do we?’