Gladys gave the message and heard her old employer’s eager promise to do so. When, she asked, when? Gladys said she didn’t know, and hung up the receiver.
A week passed. The evening of the dance at Saint James’s church hall approached. Mrs Pearson had not mentioned Peggy’s name again. She lay quiet for most of the day, smoking without pause, her eyes fixed on the glimpses of summer sky visible through the window.
Gradually, a fear for Mrs Pearson, mingled with a vague grief, began to diffuse itself through the cottages; a cloud, a whisper, rising from the hearts of the three old people. She was so changed – and still changing. Gladys said nothing; but, sometimes, she shook her head.
Erika had not bothered herself by asking Mrs Pearson a second time if she might go to the dance. She was collecting, with teutonic thoroughness, her equipment. Dress, shoes, stockings, and a hair-band that was to clasp the narrow end of the pear lay neatly displayed along the top of her chest-of-drawers, together with a new Way-Out Melon (the original was used up), a tiny plastic box of sapphire eye-shadow, and a bottle of scent named Brazilian Night.
Her room shone, gleamed, and smelt fresh. Every object was in place to a hair’s-breadth. The bed might have been made under the eye of a sergeant-major. The old book of German fairy tales, placed beside her bed by Mrs Pearson’s order, had gone into the dust-bin: Erika did not like torn, shabby things; also, all that – the Märchen – was nonsense.
After a few weeks of staring, eating to stupefaction, and learning her surroundings, she had suddenly fallen, like a quintessence of all German housewives, on the dusty, disorderly room. When she had brought home a bunch of flowers, and arranged it in a vase and put it, after consideration, now here and now there, and finally on the mantelpiece, and taken a slow stare round the fresh orderly place, a broad, gnome’s smile of satisfaction split her queer face. Gut, thought Erika, sehr gut.
She felt grateful to Mrs Pearson for giving her this room for her very own, and sorry, in a preoccupied way, that she was ill all the time, now, and hardly spoke. But she went calmly on with her preparations.
The dance was announced by a placard, tacked to one of the ancient wooden posts that still marked where a gate had once protected the cobbled lane beside the church from intruders. It was drawn by Barry Disher, whose gifts, varying from one for lettering to one for religious enthusiasm, suggested the riches poured forth by Michelangelo or Lord Bacon; it had a picture of The Spacemen, with blown-out cheeks and hair wantoning over their collars. (Barry’s own hair was of a temperate length, and perhaps the pictured locks indicated some degree of humorous disapproval.)
The distant but still horrible noise made by the four, hard at work, echoed down the quiet, elder-shaded, litter-scattered lane, sounding like sweetest Chaminade or Chopin to Erika as she approached.
Mrs Geddes was sitting in the door of the hall at a table where the tickets were given out, looking absently into the summer evening. She smiled at Erika: the scarlet coat over a skimpy red dolly-rocker, the eyes glittering with anticipatory joy, and the Way-Out Melon, gave the old woman a happiness and tenderness that must not overflow. (You must never comment; nearly all of them resented comment.)
‘Good evenink, Mrs Geddes,’ said Erika correctly, holding out three and sixpence in a white-gloved paw, while her eyes struck past her into the hall, where flags and coloured decorations could be glimpsed, ‘Der boy Barry Disher is he here?’
‘Yes, he’s here. Thank you. You can put your coat in there, look.’
She watched while Erika peeled it off; she could almost see the powerful young woman emerging from the chrysalis of a terrible childhood; the wings were powdered, not with gold dust, but with strong, coarse bronze.
‘I can’t make der dance,’ Erika confided cheerfully. She looked across at Mrs Geddes and her smile flashed. ‘But I learn quick.’
She launched herself into the crowd, and began to move through the tossing, gyrating groups, toughly inserting herself under flying limbs and past whirling legs until she was level with Barry and the tower-headed girl he was partnering. Mrs Geddes saw him stop, in the midst of a particularly violent contortion of his thin young self, and turn to her. Mrs Geddes nodded in satisfaction.
‘All right – you don’t mind, do you, Bunny?’ Barry said to the tower-headed one, who blithely shook her head and continued to stomp and sway by herself. ‘Come on – give us your hand – like this …’
When Mrs Geddes next glanced towards them, Erika was whirling and stamping like a dollyrock’d dervish, her skimpy skirt sliding up and down to reveal flashes of white frill and lively knees; her hair had shaken down from its confining scarlet band and was flying about her face.
Four hours passed like one. She found partners all the time; the gnome’s smile and the abundant energy drew them without effort on her part; she was a success. The members of the Youth Club whom she had met at the Vicarage were present, and had spread the rumour that ‘that chick had had a deprived childhood’; fortunately, the other girls present this evening had enough success themselves to prevent their saying more than ‘She doesn’t act deprived’. There were some murmurs of ‘You can say that again’.
As she drew near to the cottages, midnight was striking from the steeple among the crowded television masts on the old roofs.
She ran the last hundred yards, keeping in the shadow of the ruinous doorways to avoid a group of boys that was attacking, almost silently, a man at the end of the Walk. She waited until they were all concentrated over his fallen body, kicking and smiting in hushed fury, then shot lightly past, on the other side of the street and gained her own front door.
She rang the bell imperiously; she had not yet been promoted to a latchkey. After a prolonged interval, it was opened by Mr Fisher. Erika did not turn at once from her silent contemplation of the group still busy at the corner. He peered out, past her.
‘What? – t-t – my Gawd. Shocking, innit.’ His long mask hung beside her, horrified and sad. Erika shrugged.
‘In Germany,’ she said, almost whispering, not turning her head, ‘I haf seen shootings. Witz blood.’
‘I dare say you have … and you aren’t the only one. Now come on in, you don’t want to get mixed up with that … Where you been? Some dance?’
She nodded, and turned a face glowing with remembered pleasure. ‘I dance. Oh, I did dance, Mr Fisher!’
He was shutting the door, having gently motioned her inside. ‘Now I wonder,’ he mused, ‘should I phone up the rozzers?’
He paused, listening, holding the door ajar. The street was empty now, save for a dark object lying on the pavement; not moving. Everything was quiet. The old man shook his head. ‘Poor soul,’ he said. ‘Lying there.’
Erika yawned suddenly. ‘I go to bed,’ she announced. ‘Good-night, Mr Fisher.’
‘That’s right. Best place for you.’ She ran off, swinging her head-band blithely.
He lingered in the hall. It was absolutely silent; the pink light shone down on the prettiness everywhere, giving a false calm. ‘Chances are,’ muttered Mr Fisher, ‘by the time they get ’ere it’ll be all over bar the shoutin’ … best leave well alone.’
He looked after Erika, as she vigorously mounted the last stair. ‘Flyin’ around everywhere now, and couldn’t hardly creep when you first come – it’s all this food they give them now adays, I don’t hold with it. They can say what they like, I don’t hold with it.’
When the soft mumble of his words ended, the silence came forward again. The peaceful stairs beckoned him up to his bed. The absolute stillness always characteristic of the cottage was, if possible, deepened by the hour, but from outside the thick, closely shut old door came the myriad murmurs of a London summer night, indistinguishable from one another in the vast, coarse hum rising from all over the city’s sleepless miles, but unmistakably sinister. The old man’s eyes were fixed on the door, as if trusting in its age and thickness, yet seeing beyond it the dusty pavement, and the battered head, cooling, pe
rhaps, on the stone.
He moved a little towards the stairs, then hesitated, turning back towards the telephone on the table. It was more a twisting, hesitant movement of his body than of his feet; he swayed, as if caught in conflicting currents, and all the time he murmured disconnectedly. At last, as if bracing himself, he almost snatched the receiver in his firmest clasp, and dialled the frightening, yet comforting, signal that meant help would come.
In his firmest voice, too, he gave the details, and the place, and his name. A voice, calm and authoritative, instructed him. When he replaced the receiver, he passed his pale tongue over his dry lips and sighed dreadfully; his heart shook against his rib-cage as if it were an animal bounding from side to side and trying to get out; he had never been so aware of it, and he felt, too, what power it had, how he relied upon it, how it sent the blood that kept him alive running along his veins. It was dreadfully moved to-night, it wanted to take him creeping upstairs, and make him lie down quietly in his room in the dark.
But – ‘Might juss make that difference,’ he muttered. ‘Curse the lot of them. Beasts and pigs. Don’t suppose he’s no better than the rest. But it might make all the difference.’ He shook his head, compressing his lips, shutting his eyes.
‘Gawd –’ said Mr Fisher, ‘don’t You think I’m doing this for You. You and me parted brass-rags when Minnie … It’s on’y that it might juss make all the difference. You never know. It juss might.’
He shuffled to the door, and, with difficulty because his hands were shaking so and because every pore and cell in his body was shrieking to him to keep it shut, he turned the catch and slid it open.
The warm blue night looked mildly in, and a whisper of wind cooled his face. The colossal murmur of the streets, indifferent yet threatening, flowed against his ear-drums. He shuffled quickly down the steps, under the eyes of the horned, smiling head, and down the Walk, between the silent and boarded houses, towards the bundle lying on the pavement. There was not a soul about; not a car; not a footstep or a sound; only the night and the distant roar of the wakeful streets.
It was very dreadful to see. Mr Fisher, the lover of green grass and leaves, felt sickness begin to rise in him as he looked at it. He made his trembling knees bend until he knelt beside it, and he put out his clean, ancient hands to feel the heart. Don’t touch anything – it always said – but … feel … there were buttons to undo, and while he was fumbling helplessly, almost senselessly with them and muttering through shaking lips – ‘If we was all … all of us … everyone … might juss make the difference …’ someone crept up behind him and a shadow fell across him.
He started round and looked up; in time to see a face, ripe and smooth, with a frightened boy’s grin, and young muscles lifting leather-clad arms above rich, flowing hair, before he was struck with enough force to kill him: more than enough indeed; a quarter of it would have sufficed.
31
The Police and the Church, between them, managed it all, and got Mr Fisher’s body put tidily, and even with a brief reverence, into the earth; on a morning of steady sunlight, beating down out of the bluest of skies.
When the sisters were at home again, Gladys could not resist the temptation to speak of what had been in her mind ever since the shocking early hours, three days ago, when they had been aroused with the news of his death.
‘What about his things, Annie?’ she burst out, with a glance towards the ceiling.
‘Oh Glad! It wouldn’t be right.’
‘Oo says so? Give me his key, didn’t she – “You do it, Glad dear,” she says, “I’m so tired”. Might be mice in there or anything …’
But what Gladys was thinking might be ‘in there’ was money; savings; a hoard, like you read about sometimes in The People or the Hornsey Journal.
‘But all his things, Glad. He always kept himself so private.’
‘Too private, I’d say … there’s a mystery there, I often thought to myself. Got a fortune hidden away, I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘A fortune! Why, he couldn’t hardly afford a bit of fish and chips not more than once a munf!’
‘There was that man in Hornsey Lane, lived in that ’ouse opposite those new flats, regular recluse, all over spiders everythink was, the paper said, and two hundred pounds up the chimney!’
‘Silly place to put it,’ was Annie’s comment.
‘Well, ’oo is to go, if I don’t?’ Gladys demanded as her sister was silent. ‘She won’t, and I s’pose you won’t, seeing the way you’re carrying on, and I’m not having Erika up there.’
‘Then I s’pose it’ll have to be you,’ muttered Annie, defeated.
‘I s’pose it will. And don’t go creating about it afterwards, if you please.’
‘Oh do leave me alone, Glad, there’s a dear,’ and Annie, weeping, retreated into the ghost of a long-discarded balaclava.
A few days passed. Gladys, after the day’s holiday given her with willing sympathy by the Cypriots to attend the funeral, went back to her work, and life continued: yet it was greatly changed; she felt the change so strongly that her cheerfulness deserted her.
In the cottage the hush, always noticeable, was now oppressive; it weighed upon her so that she had not even the spirit to grumble at everyone – Annie, herself, Mrs Pearson, the rackman – for being ‘so down’.
The man, of course, was not grieving for Mr Fisher; his heart was not likely to be touched by the murder of a tenant paying eight and sixpence a week. She knew this; and she expected to return from work any afternoon and hear that Mr Fisher’s attic was to be let; at ten times the rent.
No; it was Mrs Pearson the rackman was worrying about; her increasing thinness, her silence. Gladys had glimpsed, and overheard as she went about her occupations, his low-toned arguments in the hall and on the landing with Mr Geddes or the curate, in which Pearson’s obstinacy and growing anguish struggled against accepting their advice to consult a doctor.
Yet Gladys thought that Mrs Pearson, ‘in herself’, as the slightly mysterious phrase has it, seemed what she thought of as brighter. She had had no more, so far as Gladys knew, of those frightening attacks and the clergy went away from their daily visits with faces that were grave but not sad.
It was mid-June; the big poppies were out in the parks, and the evenings were long, long, and lingering into a crystal dusk.
Mrs Corbett had been brought as near to stubborn resentment as her nature could come, by Peggy’s flight. She would not talk about her, and even reproved the dogs for missing her; she was tart with Arnold for obviously missing her too, and when, on one of the long evenings, when he had returned early from an engagement in London and they were sitting in the bay window over-looking the valley, he confessed that he had ‘thought about marrying’ her, anger and astonishment and shock exploded into a bitter sentence about gold-diggers.
‘No, Mamma, you can’t accuse her of that. She’s lazy and likes her comforts, that’s all. (They aren’t like most people’s, either.) But she wouldn’t marry for money, and she dislikes me, if anything.’
‘I suppose she’d marry for these “comforts” whatever they may be – she’s such a peculiar girl – why you had to choose … and there’s poor Gwen …’
‘Oh nonsense about poor Gwen. She’s been tied up for years with Arthur Bennett.’
‘Arnold! No! How dreadful!’
He shrugged. ‘Now keep it dark, will you? I didn’t mean to tell you, only …’
‘But poor Elsie. Such a devoted couple … I always thought …’
‘That’s just it,’ Arnold said darkly.
He had hoped that the revelation might have deflected her thoughts, but realized that the first confidence naturally possessed staying-power over the second: she returned immediately to his confession.
‘I never imagined it for an instant. I thought you got on quite well, of course, not like you were with Alice – and even Peggy, splendid though she was with the dogs, wasn’t like dear Alice – well, if all this has bee
n going on, I wonder you haven’t done something about finding out where she is.’
‘I know where she is.’ He leant forward to stub out a cigarette. ‘Or I’m almost certain I do.’
‘Arnold! You’re quite extraordinary to-night! Where is she, then?’
He told her, briefly, about the excursion to Sussex on Easter Sunday and the girl who had turned her horse and galloped away in terror.
‘There’s a man there,’ he concluded, ‘runs the school, I expect. That’s where Peggy will be.’
Mrs Corbett was nearly eighty-four years old; a cherished, healthy, placid eighty-four, and supported on a plinth of years that had been of almost unclouded pleasantness. Yet there had been eighty-four of them – and she suddenly felt that she did not want, after this last piece of information that hinted at a scandal, this evening, to hear anything more that was surprising and unpleasant.
She looked across at her son through the contact lenses that allowed her eyes to shine almost as blue and clear as they had at sixty, and said, grumpily:
‘I suppose you’ll be off down there any day, then,’ and his answer was, ‘Yes; I’m just giving the thing time to pack up, and then I’m going.’
She said no more. It was a stranger, crueller world than the one she remembered. There was a favourite television programme due in five minutes, and she turned, with a sensation of comfort, to that. He left her; sitting in the bay overlooking the meadows now hemmed in by houses, where the propellers of aeroplanes sent to the scrap heap half a century ago roared silently behind the noise and glitter of a main road.
Peggy had been gone three weeks. He did nothing more about his plan; he waited.
An instinct, vague yet strong, prompted him to let a month elapse before he went to Sedgemere. It was so imperious that he did not even trouble to find out if she were staying near there; it let him take the risk of ignoring the house in the bomb-broken slum where her mother might tell him where she was. It compelled him to wait, passively, until next week would bring the month to an end.