The Time Before This

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  ‘That Joe!’ she answered viciously. ‘He’s a snake! And those other two just need shooting! They’re the meanest pair.’

  ‘That’s the way they’re built.’

  She was suddenly glaring at me. ‘They don’t have to act that way! Mr Shepherd–’ I had a moment’s difficulty in recognizing the old man under the formal label, ‘–Mr Shepherd says they can’t help it. That’s not true!’

  ‘But–’

  ‘It’s not true!’ From some pent-up spring, a torrent of argument burst out. ‘People are always saying they can’t help it! If they steal a million dollars, they say they couldn’t help it! If they get pregnant, they say it wasn’t their fault! Even if there’s a war, it’s just too bad, it can’t be helped. Baloney! Things don’t just happen. It’s people that do things, and they can help it!’

  Before such vehemence, I might have backed away with a soft answer. But a small demon from the realm of discord prompted me to ask: ‘What about you, then?’

  ‘What about me?’ she snapped. ‘I’m not dreaming up any excuses! I’ve made my own life, and I’m not blaming it on anyone else! Anything that’s happened to me is my own fault.’

  ‘Then that must go for the old man, too.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’ve got to admit that he’s been making a fool of himself, lately. And it’s been going on for a long time, hasn’t it? He doesn’t have to go down to the bar and stick his neck out. That’s his own fault.’

  She sighed, losing the edge of her anger and her taut determination. ‘Oh, sure … It’s his own fault, all right … He can help it, but he doesn’t want to … He says he’s fishing.’ The strange word slipped by us, and away. Mary sighed again, a deeper, more considered message from a compassionate heart. ‘Don’t think I haven’t warned him … He goes on like this, they’ll crucify him.’

  They crucified him that same night, with ease and with appetite. I should have been there, perhaps to make it less cruel, perhaps to stop the execution altogether; but in fact I backed away from it, at the first show of teeth, like any mangy dog. Excuses need time to formulate, and careful thought to make them convincing. At the moment of truth – which is a real thing, not a by-product of the bull – I had none that were not ignoble.

  I had left my room about nine o’clock, and gone downstairs in the general direction of the bar. I talked to the desk clerk in the lobby, and bought some cigarettes, and stepped outside for a brief look at the stars and two economical breaths of ice-cold air. Then I crossed the lobby again, making for the swing doors, and stopped in my tracks at the sound of a voice.

  It was the expected voice, the known voice, shrill and keyed-up, shouting: ‘This time you have gone too far!’ Before I even had time to echo, in thought, Ed’s words: ‘Here we go again,’ there was a crash of broken glass, a moment of silence, and then the same voice on a gasping note of denunciation: ‘It’s a horrible thought – that two thousand years of civilization – can only produce a brute like you! Perhaps we should – wipe out what we have done – and try again!’

  I knew then that I was not going through that door into the bar, for all the sunbeams in Heaven. Indeed, I had turned away from it, even before the excuses starting queueing up in my mind. All I wanted was a quiet evening. By the sound of it, there were far too many people there. I didn’t really need a drink. I had a drink up in my room, anyway. And why should I waste time with the same dreary scene, when actually I had all this work to do?

  Every sort of reason.

  To the prudent music of ‘I know not the man’, I climbed the stairs again, and went back to my burrow.

  It was Mary who roused me out, a half-hour later. She burst in, without knocking; her face was distraught, her hair wildly tousled. The dress, torn at the shoulder, signed the completed picture with a sordid scrawl of violence. Irose from my typewriter, knowing that I was not going to escape after all.

  ‘What’s the trouble?’

  The words came tumbling out: ‘They took him away! You must do something! They beat him up and took him away!’

  ‘Who took him away?’

  ‘The police.’

  I was conscious of relief; the news seemed a noticeable improvement upon the past. Mary continued to stare at me, as if she expected me to jump on a snow-white horse and gallop to the rescue, with no more delay than a caper or two before the cameras. She was not yet up to date with the official mood of disengagement.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘let’s work something out. Sit down and have a drink, for a start.’

  ‘We haven’t got time!’

  I didn’t like the sound of that at all; brisk movement was no part of the plan – nor was any other kind of movement. I crossed to the night table, and poured myself a drink, very slowly, very deliberately. I had my own decisive scene to play, the one that solved everything and sent the audience home with a warm feeling that, after the troublemakers had done their worst, business trends were still up.

  I said, in a soothing voice: ‘There can’t be all that hurry, if he’s in jail.’

  ‘But we must get him out. Or he’ll die.’

  She sat down on the bed, and was hitching the edge of her dress together with trembling fingers; she had taken, from me, the cue for calmness, but it was not yet within her compass. I poured her a drink, and she accepted it, and gulped greedily; it was the first time I had seen her do anything save sip at her glass, a sip which consumed time more than liquor. Now her hands were reaching for her hair; her fingers became combs as she tried to set it to rights. She was doing her best to lower the temperature.

  I said, like any stage uncle: ‘That’s better. . . Now tell me what happened.’

  She gathered her wits, towards a reasoned story.

  ‘He got in a row again, and Callaghan beat him up.’

  ‘Callaghan?’

  ‘The big one.’

  The Ox … ‘But how did it start?’

  ‘Oh, Callaghan began picking on him. You know.’ Her face was drawn and hopeless as she relived the sequence. ‘He was waiting for him, because of what happened last time, when you … He climbed right in, as soon as Shepherd came up to the bar. There was an argument, and Callaghan started to slap him around.’

  ‘Didn’t anyone try to stop him?’

  ‘Not this time.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Then he fell down, and Joe called the police.’

  The pronouns were mixed, but they could not mask the story. A thug had had his way, an old man had been beaten to the ground. The fact that I had heard the prologue to it myself, and had backed away, was beginning to tell. From the look of her, Mary had played a much more valiant part.

  As if chiming in with my thoughts, she stood up again, and smoothed her rumpled dress, and said: ‘You must help him.’

  Her voice had lost its strident edge; the tone was simple pleading. I reacted to it brusquely.

  ‘Help him? How help him? What could I do?’

  ‘Bail him out. Get him home somehow.’ Her hands were clasping and unclasping, as if uttering small, urgent prayers. ‘He looked so terrible … He looked nearly dead when they carried him out.’

  ‘They’ll take care of him all right.’

  ‘They won’t! The police here are awful. I know!’ I turned away. ‘Well, anyway … It’s out of my hands. It’s got nothing to do with me.’

  ‘It has everything to do with you!’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ I tried a scornful laugh, not too successful. ‘How do you figure that out?’

  ‘Because of what’s happened. Because you must be interested, or you wouldn’t have asked all those questions. Because you helped him the last time, and now he needs help again. More than ever. If you weren’t sorry for him, you wouldn’t have helped him the last time. Why did you help him, if you weren’t interested?’

  Why indeed? And how could an old man brutalized be less appealing than an old man merely threatened? The leaven of pity, the most insidious blackmail
in all the world, was working against me. In face of it, a man could say ‘No’ only just so often … But I stalled once more, in sulky defiance, the last refuge of the hard-driven male.

  ‘It’s his own fault.’

  ‘It’s everybody’s fault!’ She came near to me. For some reason, undefined, the trap had sprung while I was looking elsewhere. It was as if she were handing me my coat, and I were taking it without argument. She said again: ‘You’ve got to help him.’

  Jail Delivery

  She had said that the Bone Lake police were awful. They were. They were especially awful in the person of the man in charge of the station that night, Sergeant Labelle.

  I am pro-police; my father was a policeman, before he became a soldier. But not all policemen brought honour to the uniform. Canada had a wide range, from the very top of the international credit tree – the RCMP – down to a force not highly regarded in our part of the world, where acorrupt political regime had steadily debased it, over a space of twenty years, to the level of a private strong-arm squad. Though the machine was now gone, the infection lingered. It was clear that it lingered most lovingly in the blood of Sergeant Labelle.

  First impressions are best, because they are the brightest; what comes after is likely to be staled by familiarity. This was a man I could never like; an oaf in authority, a man whom the insolence of office had rendered repellent. Some of it centred in his appearance, which of course he could not help; but even a big fat man, a beer-and-beefburger man with his belly straining against a snake’s-head belt, did not have to lounge at his desk as if he were the lord of creation.

  He did not have to wear a stained and crumpled uniform which must, from the moment he put it on, have achieved scarecrow status. He did not have to pick his teeth; he did not have to have his cap on the back of his head; he did not have to look Mary up and down as though she were a piece of tainted meat which might, in part, prove eatable. Above all, he did not have to sigh, as if our intrusion were intolerable, and lean forward, and growl: ‘What is it now?’

  Mary sat down on a bare bench at one side of the cluttered, whitewashed room; Labelle’s pig-eyes followed her briefly before coming back to me. I met them with all the coldness which instinct prompted, and said: ‘I’ve come about the old man.’

  At my direct words his glance flickered down and away, and he countered, too quickly: ‘What old man?’

  ‘Mr Shepherd.’

  ‘Mister Shepherd.’ The accent was an insult, and the pretence of consulting the papers on his desk was grisly. I waited, while the sergeant went through this part of his act. Finally he sat back, lounging again, and said: ‘Shepherd … Well, well … You a relative?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Peter Benton.’

  ‘Who d’you work for?’

  ‘The Toronto Journal.’

  ‘Is that so?’ There was a slight, a very slight, change of manner here; my paper was well known; it had connotations of power and, above all, money. Labelle drummed on the arm of his chair for a few moments, thinking it out. Then ill nature rose above prudence. He said, sarcastically: ‘Going to write us up?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Going to write about the old man?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Glad to hear it. Because you’d be wasting your time.’ He waited, but I said nothing. ‘Because Shepherd’s just a jerk,’ he went on, much more roughly. ‘A trouble-maker. A real sorehead.’ He was watching my face, hoping to come up with a word which would hit. When I still did not answer, he said: ‘Fact is, we’ve had just about enough of your friend.’

  I was going to answer: ‘He is not my friend,’ and then I thought – or I felt – that I should not use these words; not to smooth the situation, not to curry favour, not in any circumstances. In the pursuit of a quiet life, I had gone far enough along that road already. Now the old man was hurt, and if there was one place in the world where he needed friends, it was here in this police station.

  To deny him now would be like driving away from a road accident seen through the rear-view mirror. The pile-up is not one’s own concern; it will waste time, it will ruin a schedule, it will mean questions and answers, and probably blood on one’s clothes. And yet one must stop, and turn, and bear a hand. Strangers bleeding to death can never quite be strangers.

  I took my stand within this ring. ‘In the present case, my friend is not to blame.’

  ‘That’s not the way I heard it.’ Faced with opposition, Labelle’s eyes narrowed, and his fat jaw thrust forward into prominence. ‘He picked a fight, and he got hurt. It’s not the first time.’

  I shook my head. ‘He was arguing, and the man he was arguing with lost his temper and beat him up.’

  ‘Then he shouldn’t argue.’ Labelle leant forward again. ‘Look, I don’t have to waste time with this. Shepherd makes trouble. He’s always doing it. This isn’t the only complaint. If he goes on doing it, he’ll end up in the morgue. I don’t want him in my territory.’

  Territory, I thought – now there was a word … I was watching Labelle; he was crudely conscious of his authority, and he didn’t like me and he didn’t like interference. Yet there was something in his manner which was less than ruthless; he couldn’t help being tough, but he was holding back the full charge – as though he would not stand in my way, if I fell in with his plans. There was a flaw somewhere, a discord within the harmony of arrogance. But before I could probe it, Labelle himself came some of the way to help me.

  ‘Well, if you want him, that’s your choice.’ He jerked his head backwards, towards a door behind him. ‘He’s in there. You better take a look at him.’ And as I glanced from him to the door, surprised, he said, with a return of his full brutality: ‘You think I was going to carry him to the cells?’

  Mary had already jumped up; she reached the door before me. I followed her into the narrow slit of a room which lay beyond.

  I don’t know what I had expected to see, but it was pitiful. The old man was sitting on the floor, propped up against the bare wall. There was blood on his coat, and on the palms of his hands; a brutal weal down one side of his face had puffed out, thickening his lips, distorting the whole outline of his head into shapeless ugliness. His eyes were closed, and from the bruised mouth a whimpering sound came, a surrender to pain much weaker than a cry, and far short of words.

  Mary said: ‘Oh God!’ and dropped on her knees, cradling his head against her breast. He gasped, and almost screamed, at the movement; the raw side of his face must have been in agony. Over her shoulder she called: ‘We’ve got to get him out of here. He’ll die!’

  I stood irresolute. I too wanted to take him in my arms, and raise up that shattered form. But we had nothing to work with, not so much as a cup of water to bathe his wounds. I turned and went back into the larger room.

  It was empty; where Labelle had been sitting, only a curl of acrid cigar smoke recalled his presence. For a moment I wondered if he were part of some evil dream, if there were, in truth and happily, no such man. While I was still wondering, he came back in again, by another door.

  He had been washing his hands; now he was wiping them on a grey-white towel. He had a sullen look on his face, which told me that he was not going to speak until I did.

  I said: ‘He can’t stay here.’

  ‘You’re damn’ right he can’t!’

  ‘You should have called a doctor.’

  ‘I got better things to do with my time.’ But something in my face must have shown the strength of my loathing, and the path it might take. My hatred was nothing; but behind me he saw a rich newspaper, headlines, phone calls, paperwork. I had met it before, in people who, like pale slugs, needed the dark. He dropped the towel on the desk, and massaged his dry hands together, and said: ‘Look, don’t make such a production … He’s OK … Good night’s sleep, that’s all … You want him, you take him home.’

  I knew then that he wished for nothing more than to get rid of the whole t
hing, that he was afraid Shepherd would die on his hands. As long as the old man was only walking wounded, he could walk his way to the graveyard … It would have been a fierce joy to refuse, to saddle Labelle with a dead body and a crushing guilt. But I could not do that, either.

  ‘You’re releasing him?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah. Just keep him quiet, that’s all.’

  ‘On bail?’

  ‘No. We’ll clean the whole thing up now.’

  It was a curious phrase, and, within its framework, disgusting. A thousand men with a thousand mops could not cleanse this stable. But before I had time to guess what was in his mind, Labelle sat down at his desk, and took up a pen. He drew a diary or logbook towards him, and with stubby fingers scored through some entry in it. Then he looked up at me again, as if he had done something clever and complicated, and said: ‘So far, so good.’

  ‘What about charges?’

  He was curt. ‘There’s no charges.’

  ‘What about charges against Callaghan?’

  He had an answer for that, too. With invincible certainty he said: ‘Callaghan was provoked. We got witnesses.’

  It was hard to swallow, but somehow I managed it. ‘You mean, the old man can go free?’

  ‘Just that.’

  I called to Mary, within the other room: ‘We’re ready to leave,’ and there was a murmur, a stirring, another gasp of pain. I heard her say: ‘Gently. Easy … Let me help you.’

  I took a step towards the room, knowing I must be needed. From behind me came Labelle’s voice: ‘Hold on a minute. There’s the court costs.’

  ‘Court costs?’

  ‘Just that. He’s been booked. Drunk and disorderly. Assault. Resisting arrest. I’m letting him go with a caution. But it’s a legal process.’

  ‘How much?’

  He scratched his jaw, eyeing me, weighing me up. ‘Three charges. Let’s say – thirty dollars.’