An Open Prison

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘Come, come, Mrs Hayes. Just where does this impression of your husband’s character take us? What do you suppose him to be up to? Let us get that clear.’

  ‘He’s after him.’

  This abrupt colloquialism, foreign to the speaker’s usual style, was startling in itself. Considered in conjunction with what she had just said, it was even more so. I was being told that Mr Hayes had absconded from Hutton Green in order to avenge himself upon the man who had sent him there. And inevitably there at once came into my head what both John Stafford and I had concluded to be a persuasion equally bizarre in Sir Henry Daviot himself: that the Hayeses, father and son, had entered into a conspiracy to strike at him in some way through his innocent grandson – perhaps abetted in their wicked design by the objectionable Jasper Tandem.

  I told myself at once that I didn’t believe any of this – not for a moment. It was simply that when unaccountable events happened people all over the place took to having dotty ideas about them. But at the same time I found myself wishing I could remember more than I appeared able to do of that brief meeting with the convicted man in his prison. Had I come away from it with the slightest sense that I had been interviewing a potentially dangerous person? I was almost certain this wasn’t so. But was it not true that my acquaintance with criminality of any sort didn’t extend beyond the field of boys smoking in lavatories or slipping into a pub for a martini or a pint of beer? Mr Justice Daviot, who had spent much of his life gazing searchingly at suspected malefactors in the dock, was much less likely to be at sea in such matters than I was. But then again, it had at least been Stafford’s impression that Daviot’s suspicion had been something bobbing up in an inconsequent and eruptive fashion at odds with a customary more equable view of things.

  Where, if anywhere, these speculations would have led me I don’t know, for at this moment Julia Hayes came back into the room. She was carrying a couple of envelopes and a very small parcel or packet, presumably the product of a mid-morning postal delivery.

  ‘Is Mr Syson staying to lunch?’ she asked.

  I suppose Julia may have required this information in order to make some domestic arrangement for which she was responsible. But it wasn’t quite tactful, nor did her mother’s reply much mend matters.

  ‘Of course if that is what he finds convenient, Julia.’

  I hastened, in what words I could command, to intimate that it was not, and a slight awkwardness ensued. Julia was considerate enough to think to relieve it by handing what she was carrying to her mother.

  ‘A couple of bills, I expect,’ she said. ‘Let’s hope they’re not ghastly big ones, or shockingly overdue. I don’t know about the parcel. It just says “Hayes”, which seems a bit cavalier.’

  Mrs Hayes might have been expected to defer inquiry into these matters until I had taken my leave and was out of the house. But – possibly prompted by the same financial anxiety as her daughter – she tore open one of the envelopes at once.

  ‘That impertinent butcher!’ she exclaimed, and opened the second. ‘An appeal for the aged.’ This she appeared to find impertinent too, since she crumpled the thing up and tossed it into a waste-paper basket. ‘“Hayes”,’ she read, as if she didn’t much care for the name, and picked up the packet thus curtly addressed. ‘Posted in London,’ she added, in a tone suggesting that here was a circumstance distasteful in itself. ‘If you will excuse me,’ she said, with an unexpected excursion into civility. And she opened the packet.

  What was revealed, rather casually wrapped in some tissue paper, was a wrist-watch on a broad expanding metal bracelet. It was the kind of watch, not then quite so common as now, which conveys a good deal more information than the mere time of day.

  ‘How very absurd,’ Mrs Hayes said. ‘There must have been some mistake. “Hayes”, you know. It suggests incompetence.’

  ‘It’s not absurd at all.’ Julia spoke impatiently. ‘That’s Robin’s watch. He must have sent it to be repaired at the end of the holidays, and been a bit brief with his name. Now it has just come back.’

  ‘At least there isn’t a bill with it.’ Mrs Hayes had rummaged hastily to determine this, which was plainly the point of importance to her. She then dropped the watch into the drawer of a bureau, as if she took very little interest in it. No more did I, and I got up to take my leave.

  At this Mrs Hayes promptly rang a bell to summon the housemaid, who conducted me into the hall and handed me my hat. I wondered whether the poor girl, thus ‘trained’ to the rituals of a genteel household, was at all sure of her next month’s wages.

  IX

  I had taken no pleasure in my visit to Robin’s mother and sister, and was without the satisfaction of being able to feel that it had served a useful purpose. But now the scene in front of me was not at all disagreeable. Uptoncester asserted itself at once as a city inimical to sick hurry and divided aims: as consonant, in fact, with my own unashamedly conservative inclinations. In the quiet crescent in which the Hayeses’ house stood commercial bustle didn’t extend beyond a couple of messenger boys on bicycles with big baskets perched in front of the handlebars – just as they might have appeared on a picture postcard of the Edwardian era. Two clergymen had met in front of a pillar-box and were conversing with the tranquil cheerfulness of believing Christians. Two ladies exercised dogs – dogs as well trained, one felt, as Mrs Hayes’s housemaid, justly claiming the modest freedom of lamp-posts but aware that they must not foul the footpath. Close to Mrs Hayes’s well-swept front-door steps an unseasonable tourist (as he appeared to be) consulted what must have been a guidebook, rotating it as one does when trying to orientate oneself on a street-plan. The November noon was chilly but for the moment steeped in sunshine. Not far off, the cathedral bells chimed a quarter-hour.

  I had been about to make my way to my car in the car park where I had left it, but now it came into my head to be a tourist too. My day was in a state of chronological muddle, since I had miscalculated the time that would be taken up by my mission, and my next engagement was to dine with Owen Marchmont at Hutton Green, a mere two hours’ run from where I stood. I projected a visit to the cathedral, a sandwich and glass of beer in a pub, and then perhaps a further stroll, if the sunshine held, through the peaceful town and its environs.

  The terrain was not very familiar to me, but at least I required no guidebook. Knowing where there was a tobacconist, I bought myself a couple of ounces of John Cotton 1 & 2. Locating a W.H. Smith, I acquired a newspaper to glance at over my lunch: this because everything was likely to close down for an hour at one o’clock. The west front of the cathedral was as pleasing as I remembered it: generously cluttered with statuary, some of it headless, as if in emulation of Exeter or Wells. I entered, and the interior held the solemn emptiness characterising Anglican places of worship outside business hours. I wandered round for twenty minutes and there was only one other pilgrim: the man with the guidebook. We exchanged a few casual words. I did a further round – this time in the interest not of studying thirteenth-century architecture but of reading Latin epitaphs. Before one of these, of considerable elaboration, the man with the guidebook paused beside me again, and said ‘Quite a lot they had to say about dad or mum, hadn’t they?’ I explained to him that in Greek an epitaph could be an entire funeral oration. He stared at me in amazement, and moved rather hastily away.

  The early afternoon didn’t hang heavily on my hands, since there is a good deal worth at least cursory inspection in Uptoncester. But eventually I found myself wandering quite far afield, and in consequence in contemplation of a very different scene. This was the industrial estate, which announced itself on a large but half-obliterated signpost pointing down a badly cracked and puddled asphalt road. I had driven past it on some previous occasion, so it didn’t take me altogether unawares. And now, instead of turning back, I took it into my head to walk through it. I soon found that, as far as human frequentation went, I might as well have been in the central Sahara or the Nullarbor plain. Hastily b
uilt, I suppose, in anticipation of a boom that didn’t come, its materials were for the most part no more permanent than breeze-blocks and galvanised iron. Perched above these low-hutched buildings were rusty tanks which had once provided a water supply, and trailing over them like the first tentative tendrils of a potentially obliterating vegetation were fallen electric cables which nobody had bothered to tidy up. Here and there stood more assuming mini-factories of discoloured brick; these had been lit by rows of windows projecting slant-wise from the roof, so that the effect was of some savagely toothed disarticulated lower jaw of a prehistoric monster. There wasn’t an unbroken pane of glass in sight. I wondered whether this was the consequence of mere frost and gale and the effluxion of time, or whether there had been a period in which the less cultivated youth of Uptoncester had been in the habit of putting in happy holiday afternoons here with catapults and stones, so that the industrial estate had been for a time a ready-made ‘adventure playground’.

  All this tended to sombre reflection. I found a sheltered corner in which I could perch on an abandoned wooden crate in the scarcely warming sunshine, which still intermittently appeared through breaks in ominously leaden skies. I lit a pipe. (Schoolmasters were still allowed pipes in the ‘seventies, although cigarettes were already taboo.) From the young proletarians who might have rampaged here my thoughts turned to my own sort of boy, and to what my own sort of school was trying to do for him. We were in a period, I told myself, in which the ‘public’ schools (for we were already prompted to use those self-conscious inverted commas) were returning to their traditional post-Arnoldian function in society. For a long time this had been largely in abeyance – in the sense that the majority of boys at these schools (Robin Hayes and Iain Macleod, for instance) had fathers who had been at similar schools before them. But now the comfortable squirarchy and the professional classes (but not the secure aristocracy) were being progressively priced out, so that once more we were largely coping with what used to be called ‘new men’, and had in fact the somewhat thankless role of introducing them to traditions and modes of feeling which year by year were becoming outmoded in the world at large. That motto from the sixth book of the Iliad – ΑΙΕΝ ΑΡΙΣΤΕΥΕΙΝ – was already substantially old-hat, unless by striving to excel was meant doing one’s best to cut the other chap’s throat in an increasingly desperate market-place.

  These gloomy generalities were of a kind I didn’t commonly indulge myself in, and their cropping up puzzled me now. Partly, of course, the fit was occasioned by my dismal surroundings. But chiefly – I suddenly discovered – it represented a kind of masking of a much more specific anxiety. As these days had gone by, my fears about Robin Hayes had increased to an extent which, rather mysteriously, I found myself unwilling to acknowledge even to myself. It wouldn’t be true to say that for his father I didn’t care a bit. I did feel for the man and pity him. But his particular shipwreck was of a common enough sort, and a good whack of his life lay behind him. Moreover I had at least imagined myself to detect in him, not indeed the dangerousness in which his wife sought to discern a threat to the safety of Mr Justice Daviot, but rather a kind of impudent resilience hinting that he might surprise himself and others yet. But his son had his life before him, and there would be tragedy in his falling into folly which might hopelessly impede his career at its outset. Thus I explained to myself why I was anxious about Robin. And, of course, he was my top boy. Just for this term, for these two terms, he was in a unique relationship with me, distinct from my relationship with any other of my current boys.

  Rather abruptly, I knocked out my pipe, stood up, and walked on. But I had got to the further edge of the area, and it occurred to me that if I continued ahead instead of turning back I should reach open country and be able to make my way to the city by a more agreeable circular route. I still had plenty of time for this.

  What I came on almost at once was wholly unexpected. Instead of field and hedgerow and coppice, powdered with snow, I was confronted with a large expanse of sullen grey water: a roughly circular basin, artificial in suggestion, with a diameter of something like a quarter of a mile. If it was a reservoir, its water would need a good deal of purifying before it could issue from anybody’s tap. But at once I knew I had seen such creations before. They have been vast gravel-pits, excavated to provide hard core for the fabricating of endless arterial roads, and left to fill up as Brobdingnagian puddles, unpopulated even by the humblest of fish. Perhaps a couple of minutes went by before I discerned that this one had, after all, been put to some use. There was a gate, and beside it, again, a half-obliterated sign.Aquatic Leisure Park, it said. Sailing. Water Ski-ing. Snorkels on hire. Try the fascinating new Planche à Voile.

  An aquatic park was surely a novelty in itself. But of course none of the activities solicited was at present taking place, since midwinter lay not far ahead. This, however, was not alone what was obvious. The aquatic park was as defunct as the industrial estate. A boat-house, a café, sundry gimcrack erections for subsidiary entertainment were mouldering and warping themselves away in a pervasive damp. Behind me, labour; ahead of me, play: neither had been a success. It added up, I told myself, to a society in decay. In the distance I could still see the cathedral spire, serenely beautiful. But the institution it symbolised wasn’t doing too well either.

  I turned round, to go back, after all, as I had come. As I did so, a figure moved in front of me, and then dodged rapidly into cover behind one of the nearer factory buildings. It was the man with the guide-book. I realised that I had been shadowed all day.

  Owen Marchmont had as good as told me about it, after all: policemen on the doorstep and among the gooseberry-bushes. I could see the point of it. Any unidentified person visiting Mrs Hayes might be an accomplice of her husband’s and bearing a message from him. Alternatively, he might be receiving from the lady directions as to a rendezvous in the unfrequented industrial estate or anywhere else. The plain-clothes officer trailing me had no doubt been discouraged as well as startled on receiving a scrap of information in the field of Greek etymology. But he had stuck to his job.

  Was he sticking to it still? I asked myself this question as I drove out of Uptoncester. Logically, I surely remained a suspect until definitely identified, or exonerated by one means or another. But this degree of surveillance, if it extended to everybody happening in on the Hayeses, could not be other than a heavy tax on the resources of the police. As I realised this, a fresh notion occurred to me. Was it possible that Mrs Hayes was right, and that her husband was really ‘after’ Sir Henry Daviot? Was it possible, at least, that Sir Henry’s own (as I judged them) dotty apprehensions as expressed in Tim Taplow’s study were obliging the police to take quite exceptional measures? A judge of the High Court is, after all, a very important man.

  Thus finding myself in a world of totally unfamiliar speculations, I began, I can now see, to turn a little dotty myself. I glanced continually at my driving-mirror, anxious to determine whether any identifiable vehicle was keeping unnaturally in contact with me. The idea of being followed by the police can turn itself very readily into the idea of being followed by criminals. I came near to seeing myself as that sort of hunted man, dear to novelists of low life and criminal practice, who has equally to fear pursuit by the lawless and the law. I might even have panicked, stepped on the accelerator and rammed myself into a tanker or a bus (that favourite climax of films and T.V. entertainments dealing in such nonsense) had not a sense of humour come to my aid. That I own a keen or ready sense of humour I would not aver. But I did find funny the fact that I was now making my way to a prison. My pursuer – if he existed – would feel uncommonly at a loss when I drew up before Hutton Green.

  I drove faster than I would normally have done and continued to do so even when I had rationally assured myself that there was no frightful fiend behind me. The whole thing had, as the boys liked to say, ‘shook’ me. Had this not been so, I could scarcely have fallen into the extraordinary course of conduc
t which I was to embrace later that evening.

  I had turned on my headlights in the dusk, and in no time it would be dark. Even so, I was going to arrive at Hutton Green awkwardly early. Marchmont had mentioned to me that some routine duty would be occupying him until shortly before seven o’clock, and that if I arrived before that I must simply ‘make myself at home’. This troubled me. When I rang what had to be called his front-door bell it would presumably be answered by the same warder or ‘screw’ who had previously admitted me. It didn’t appear possible to say, ‘Is Mr Marchmont at home?’ and I suppose it would have to be something like, ‘Good evening. I have a dinner engagement with the Governor’. Nothing could be less complicated, yet I found myself hesitating before the encounter. I seemed even in imagination to hear the jangling of a bunch of keys emanating from this anomalous portal-guarding person.

  In this absurd frame of mind I drove into Hutton Green very shortly after six o’clock, and as I once more sought – this time in pitch darkness – the drive-way to the prison, what I first became aware of was an illuminated sign comprising a species of heraldic shield and the words Hutton Arms Hotel. I recalled this as a hostelry of an evidently superior sort, which had probably once provided good entertainment for man and beast, and in this later age did a certain amount of residential business in a weekending way. I found myself drawing up before it. To put in half an hour here would solve my chronological problem. And I felt like a drink.

  There was a lounge of modest size, with a big open fire, and there was only one guest on view. Or partially on view, since he was sitting on one side of the fire-place behind an open copy of The Times, and thus exhibited nothing but a pair of well-polished shoes and equally well-tailored lower limbs. I rang a bell and was brought my drink with commendable speed almost as soon as I had settled down to warm myself on the other side of the fire. I was now alone with the stranger, and he lowered his newspaper in order to take civil account of me.