The Walking Stick

  ‘Who knows? Ted? Jack? Anyone else?’

  ‘No. No, of course not. But they wouldn’t – couldn’t . . . Oh, Deb, what a flaming mess! But if you guessed as much as this, you must surely have worked out the rest too!’

  I sat up, pushed myself up the bed to lean against the headboard. ‘What else should I know?’

  ‘Well . . . it began like that – or more or less like that. I can’t bear to think that you know – you were never, never meant to know – but I’ve got to be honest with you: it did. But it was only an idea, just a general thought, no more. Meet her; see what happens. Nothing more than that. It began that way but it hasn’t ended that way, has it.’

  ‘Hasn’t it? I thought it had ended exactly that way.’

  He made an impatient gesture, got out of bed, pulled the curtains across, came and sat on my side of the bed. ‘What d’you think? D’you think I’ve been play-acting all this time?’

  ‘When did you stop?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake! Pretty early on. I fell in love with you. You can’t have failed to notice that!’

  ‘But when did it stop, Leigh? When did it stop? When did the play-acting stop?’

  The cigarette was still in his hand but he had bent it. He flung it on the floor. ‘There wasn’t an exact moment. Not exactly. But early on. You see . . .’

  ‘You’ll get cold sitting there. Put the fire on.’

  He kicked the switch with his bare foot. ‘You see . . .’

  I said: ‘You came to that first party with instructions. You’d got to find the girl and make a fuss of her – see how she took it. Isn’t that it?’

  ‘Not in so many words. There wasn’t any “got to” about it. It was a suggestion. See if it was worth following up.’

  ‘And it was.’

  ‘You bet it was! D’you think I’d have gone after someone I didn’t like, just to please those two?’

  ‘I don’t know. But you found “going after” me interesting?’

  ‘It got me right from the start. You got me right from the start. I didn’t need any pushing on from behind!’

  The bars of the fire were reddening slowly, like a sore place.

  ‘But there must have been a point, somewhere, where there was a change, if there was a change. Was it before we went to Spain?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes, long before. From the very beginning, I tell you. It pleased me – in a way – to be able to suit them and suit myself at the same time . . . But I suppose if there was one time when I realized how serious it was for me, it was when you found I was married and cut me off. I found I couldn’t get on without you.’

  ‘Certainly the scheme couldn’t get on without me.’

  He leaned over and put his hand on my arm. ‘Look, look look, I tell you it wasn’t like that! I swear it wasn’t like that. I’ve been crazy about you. How can I prove it? Haven’t I proved it already?’

  There was silence. ‘You say you love me?’

  ‘Christ, yes! You know I do.’

  ‘But when you fell in love with me, didn’t it ever occur to you to stop “using” me? Feeling as you did and doing as you did should contradict each other.’

  ‘No, they don’t because I needed money, we needed money, to be able to set up together. I swear I’ll never deceive you in anything important again! I swear it, Deb.’

  ‘You even used the information I let slip to get your friends to steal the Vosper tiara. How did you feel about that? Didn’t it ever trouble you?’

  ‘It troubled me like hell. All of this has troubled me. I’ve felt so much of a heel so often. But I’ve had one excuse, and that seemed to me just to make things excusable, and that was that I was doing it for you. If—’

  ‘You were doing it for me and for yourself and for Ted Sandymount and for Jack Foil. But chiefly for Jack Foil.’

  He swallowed and pushed a hand through his hair. His face in the shadowed light looked strangely handsome; his pyjama jacket was unbuttoned and showed his white throat and strong young body. ‘All right, I’m a heel. I’m a rotten stinking gett. But I love you. Does that mean anything to you in any language any longer?’

  I said: ‘It’s queer how Jack Foil planned it all. How he played the fish – through you – and the fish swallowed the bait just as he arranged it.’

  ‘Maybe it seems like that to you now, but it hasn’t been like that!’

  ‘There never was a man called “Baker” Evans, was there?’

  ‘Who? “Baker” Evans? Of the Safeguards, d’you mean?’

  ‘Yes. There never was such a man. Because—’

  ‘I didn’t know that! I swear Jack told me—’

  ‘Jack reasoned that if the whole plan could be prepared before I was asked to co-operate as a full partner and then this fictitious man fell ill, I’d give in and do his job. If he’d asked me at the beginning to stay behind and open the door for you, I’d have turned it down with horror. It was all carefully phased – tailor-made to fit my fears and my conscience.’

  ‘Now you’re making him out cleverer than he really is. He’s only played it as it came—’

  ‘Once I’d taken the first step he must have reasoned each one would follow in its proper place. How you must have talked about me, discussed me over the drinks!’

  ‘I never have I—’

  ‘Did you tell him everything, everything I said and did, so that he could plan more easily? Did you tell him we were all right in bed, and so—’

  ‘I love you and you’re beautiful!’ He was staring at me.

  ‘Or did you tell it all to Ted Sandymount so that he could repeat it to his boss?’

  ‘Really beautiful—’

  ‘Did you snigger about it? Ted would—’

  ‘I love you when you’re white and angry,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen you angry like this before.’

  ‘Did you snigger about it?’

  ‘Oh, Deborah . . .’

  ‘I’m not going to be much use to you from now on, am I? We can’t have two robberies in the same place. My chief use is gone.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that. You can’t possibly believe that all our love-making has been sham!’

  ‘Oh, you’ve enjoyed it in a way, I suppose. I certainly have. It’s been a – an experience for me. But I’m no more use to Jack Foil, am I? He may want you to do the same with some other girl. He certainly won’t want you tied up both with a wife and a mistress!’

  His hand moved up my bare arm. ‘You know I want to marry you as soon as ever I’m free.’

  ‘I don’t know anything!’ I said passionately. ‘I don’t know whether you’ve even been to a solicitor about it! I don’t know if you’ve spent money having Lorne watched! I don’t know even if you’ve been working these last months!’

  ‘How can you say that when I—’

  ‘You never brought a bus conductor’s uniform home. I wondered at the time that you could go right in without any training at all—’

  ‘Deborah, you fool! Don’t you think—’

  ‘Oh, that’s true! I am a fool. That’s what you’ve made me!’ Emotionally, ever since he came back, I’d been so cool, physical weaknesses gone, reason working, mind clear and steady. Now a first terrible crack, emotion squeezing through; mustn’t let it.

  He took my hand and kissed the fingers. ‘I know how you must feel—’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes. You think you’ve been cheated, played for a sucker all along the line. Well, so you have – though it was never so deliberate, never so planned from the start like you think. At least, not by me it wasn’t. But I admit all the rest, and I ought to be kicked round London for doing it . . .’ He straightened up and took my chin gently and looked at me with his clear eyes. ‘OK. Accepted. You don’t know what to believe. I’ve lied to you about so many things. All right, I wasn’t a bus conductor. I dreamed it up for the effect. It sounded right to me, to take that sort of job. But I did take this other job later. And I did go to a solicitor about Lorne becaus
e I did want to divorce her and marry you. That’s different. That’s for real. You must see that’s for real.’

  I did not speak, and he pushed my hair back from my forehead.

  ‘You say you can’t believe anything I’ve told you. But you can believe your own eyes, can’t you? – you know about us living together. And your own feelings: you can believe them. You can understand I wanted to paint and make a living by it. It’s the urge I’ve had in my guts ever since I was so high. Nobody really believed in me until I met Jack Foil. Lorne never did. But you did. You did for a bit, when I was painting your portrait. When you came back to me after that first row, I got to the point where I was ready to throw everything else over: Jack and Ted and the rest. Right over. You coming back gave me that glimmer of hope – just a glimmer that I’d really be able to paint and do something with it. I felt with your faith in me I was ready for anything. If I could have kept that bit of hope I’d have turned on Jack and Ted and thumbed my nose at them. I was going to. I’d made up my mind to. To throw them over.’

  ‘But you didn’t.’

  ‘No, because I went to see your two friends in the West End, and they tore my painting to strips! It tore me to strips too! You were with me. You know that.’

  ‘Yes, I know that.’

  ‘You slept with me that night – half out of sympathy maybe. Did I seem like a practised seducer? Did I? Have I ever? To tell the truth I’ve always been a bit scared of women – something the way I’ve been scared of the police.’ He smiled crookedly. ‘So we went to Spain together—’

  ‘At Jack Foil’s suggestion.’

  ‘Maybe. But you’ve got to sort that out too. Because he suggested it, it doesn’t make what happened there untrue. If that was play-acting while I was there, then I wouldn’t need to paint for a living: I’d be a Laurence Olivier in no time. So then we came back and you came to live here. And I was a sort of split personality, because I was following along a general sort of road that would lead to us going for Whittington’s, with your help. But I was only doing that because it all made sense with the way I felt about you. Cheating you and playing fair with you meant doing and saying the same things.’

  The fire was bright now, warming us; the bed and his body took a glow from it.

  ‘Lovey, do you believe me?’

  ‘Nothing makes any sense any more.’

  ‘Some things do. You must know that some things do.’ He put his hand on my shoulder and slipped the nightdress strap down. Then his hand closed gently round my breast. He kissed me. I pulled away but he followed.

  ‘No, Leigh.’

  ‘Yes, love.’

  ‘Don’t you understand – that tonight . . .’

  ‘It’s the only answer,’ he said.

  ‘How can it be?’

  ‘Because it is. Because there can’t be any lies in this. If this doesn’t answer your doubts, then there isn’t any answer.’

  ‘But don’t you see—’ I said.

  ‘What?’ he said, and stopped me from speaking.

  I wanted to say: but that by itself can’t begin to be an answer; because I’d never really doubted his sexual pleasure; it had been too obvious; as maybe mine had too. But that by itself wasn’t an answer. Just as before, there was this lack of contact, this lack of merging of spiritual plasma – all the more to be missed because of the intimate merging of our body moistures when we made love.

  And we made love tonight. Against all reason and sense. Almost against desire. And in spite of it, after all that had gone before it, the nervous stress, the bitter heartbreak, the consuming anger, the vile coldness of betrayal, after all that, everything came as it should. This I can never explain.

  When it was over he lay for a long time with his curly head on my shoulder, breathing deeply on to my skin. Sleep was coming on us both. God, it was so inappropriate but so welcome! It was like a gentle death, creeping into the limbs quietly, stealing away the hideous nervous tautnesses of the day, moving into the body, so that gradually even the mind relaxed its grip. They are not long, the weeping and the laughter, Love and desire and hate . . . Sleep. Tomorrow was another day. Decisions, fears, bitterness, eviscerated love, sex desires, self-contempt, fierce hatred, angry pride, pressures of conscience, pain, pleasure, even the acts of breathing and limping: they could all wait. Down under the surfaces of sleep, gently diving, drifting away from life – surfacing briefly as he moved away. ‘I got you that time,’ he said. Beginning to drift again. Fire was still on but not the light. Warm orange red on ceiling and wall. Marks. Bars. Prison bars. Saloon bars. Jack Foil peering. Cataract. But it’s too early to operate. Decisions, fears, bitterness, eviscerated love. Eight hours. Hours of death. Gently diving again. Under surface. Last prickings of eyelids. Warm naked sleep. Nothing to fear or decide for hours and hours. No pain. No pleasure except the relief of quiet oblivion.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Morning light. He was bending over me. ‘I got you a cup of coffee, love. It’s eight – so we’d best be stirring.’

  Pain. Morning light and pain. All the old conflicts. Monks from an inquisition, waiting round the bed to attack again as soon as the victim recovered consciousness. To thine own self be true. But where is thine own self, in which corner of the mind hiding? Conscience, thou shalt not; pleasure, I want, I want; revenge, I will repay; forgiveness, as we forgive them; suspicion, where still is the truth of it all? Perhaps there is no such thing as thine own self but only an aggregate of impulses, as there is no dictator in a democracy but only an aggregate of voters. And when no majority emerges there is chaos.

  Chaos. I got up, bathed, heard him whistling as he made breakfast. On top of the world. No remorse for deceit now. All forgiven and forgotten. He had put it all behind him with a single act of conquest, a single sexual act. Was it conceivable? No, I underrated him. All the same he was happy knowing that everything would come all right in the end.

  But what was ‘all right’ to him? Marriage to me? Setting up in business, with me? Settling down, with me? Was this really his aim? How far had it been the bait to make the fish snap? He was in love with me, he said. But even if he didn’t know it, the idea, like a hormone, had been implanted in him by Surgeon Foil. Leigh believed something with complete sincerity while it existed in his mind, but whether it was true or not by objective standards was another matter. Was marriage even my aim now? I was as deeply involved as ever – no doubt of that – but further from understanding than I had ever been. Humpty Dumpty had had a great fall. The pieces at the bottom of the wall no longer made any recognizable shape.

  We sat together at the kitchen table, eating toast and marmalade and drinking more coffee like a homely married couple. He chatted cheerfully, but there was a wariness behind it. It wasn’t lost on him that last night’s subject had only been most sketchily explored. There was so much, so very much more to say. For the moment he was avoiding it, as someone avoids changing the dressing on a wound. Let it heal a little. Let it rest.

  He said he’d drive me to work this morning, it didn’t matter if he didn’t get there himself till ten; anyway he’d be leaving in a week or two. What time would I be through? About one, I expected. Then I’ll meet you too. No, don’t do that, you were going to watch Charlton with Ted. Well, I can do that afterwards but it’s not important; Ted can go on his own. No, I think I’ll stay in the West End for lunch; I promised to see Sarah. How would it be if we met for lunch and then drove over to see the shop, paid the deposit? No, leave it till tomorrow as we’d agreed.

  Then how about this evening? Do a show or something. No energy needed; shall I pick you up at Sarah’s at six-thirty? I’ll shop around, get the tickets. I’ll get something that starts at eight and then we can have a slap-up dinner first. Perhaps so, I said; perhaps we could do that.

  Time was getting on, so I put on my coat and went out to feed the swans. They were nearby today and came quickly, strong feet paddling. Leigh came out with me and stood watching, an arm on my shoulder. A string
of barges was in midstream, moving quite silently with the tide. Washing was hung out on the leading barge. Smoke drifted downstream from some boat that had already passed. A streak of washed blue in the sky was gradually clouding over. Smell of the river, fresh and cold.

  We turned to go in. He had never mentioned the broken drawer, though by now he must have seen it. He put on his short coat and we went out to the car. I slipped a bit as I got in and he came quickly round to see if I’d hurt myself. No. All was well.

  All was well. Before switching on the ignition he turned and looked at me. ‘God, it was fabulous last night. I never thought – after what you must have been through . . .’

  ‘I never thought either.’

  ‘You were marvellous. Honest, you nearly always are.’ He switched on and pushed the starter. It fired almost at once. ‘God, Deborah, you’ve changed since I first met you!’

  I stared through the side window at the door we had just closed.

  ‘Does anybody else ever tell you?’

  ‘What, Leigh?’

  ‘How much you’ve changed. Don’t they ever say?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Perhaps they don’t all know as much as me.’

  ‘Maybe not.’

  He put the car in gear and we moved off. Soon we were in traffic. ‘I sometimes think—’

  ‘What, Leigh?’

  ‘I think of how you were when we first met. You were bright enough, and pretty, of course, marvellously pretty; but, sort of grown in. In a groove. Settled to be someone who didn’t have as much fun as other people.’

  ‘Different fun.’

  ‘Yes, different fun.’ We stopped and started and stopped. The traffic seemed no easier for being Saturday morning. ‘But it didn’t need to be different, did it. Now . . . you skate; you do it as well as me. Remember that first time, how furious you were because I tricked you into going. And the second time, when you really tried it, the way we staggered and slid and lurched, like a couple of drunks.’ He laughed.

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘And you drive a car now. And you swim. And you dance. That’s something great, I think.’