The Tumbled House

  She went across and knelt beside him; his face was deathly; she tried pressure again; hold on; just for ten minutes more; hold on.

  A bell. At the end of the street. She flew to the door, screamed at them; they were on the other side and past; the driver crashed his gears getting in reverse and roared back towards her.

  Ambulance doors open; two men: “ This way,” she said. They followed her with a stretcher. They went up to him. One man made a face at the sight of Michael’s pallor. They picked him up. On the stretcher. As they went out someone from upstairs was peering down. “ Has there been an accident?”

  In. They helped Bennie up. The car was off before the doors were closed. One man was in with Bennie. “ Have you any blood here?” “No,” he said. “ Don’t worry, we won’t be long now.”

  The ambulance squealed out on to the Fulham Road, roared past buses, clanging bell, charged a traffic light and squeezed between a string of cars. Turning again. Bennie had no sense of direction; the ambulance man was trying to do what she had tried, to stop the flow with pressure. It was dripping on the floor already. But it was slower. Another lurch. The man said apologetically: “We take this route; it saves the nasty turn at the top of Sloane Street.”

  Bennie didn’t reply. Her nerves had gone now. She sat quite still, holding Michael’s head in her lap. The blood on her hands had got into his hair.

  “Belgrave Square,” said the man. “ Two minutes now.”

  Bennie thought: I did this once before—on a different trip—from Roland Gardens to Belgrave Street; the night when Michael gave his house-warming party and I found that his father was Moonraker; we rushed along much this same route in Michael’s old Delage—such a long time ago, it seems; half an age; very carefree then; Michael and Peter and Boy and Pat and me and the girl called Kathie; it was just the same as this, squealing up to traffic lights, swerving round corners, lurching in and out of the traffic. What has gone wrong since then? Everything has gone wrong. Would it have all been different if she’d married Michael then? Would she have been a steadying influence? Had he done all these things, got into this impossible mess because he wasn’t sure she would marry him? how could one have seen this end? What clairvoyance did life ask? Or was the pattern laid down? the puppets dancing with a show of freedom but with the futility of dummies on wires.…

  The ambulance jerked to a stop, then crawled a few yards further. The ambulance man flung open the doors. The other man was already out, and he jumped in the back. Bennie was relieved of the weight in her arms. She said: “ I don’t think there’s any hurry now.”

  They stared at her, then looked at Michael in the shadowy light. Not commenting, they lowered the stretcher and carried it into the hospital.

  The casualty officer was waiting for them. He looked at Michael, then glanced swiftly at Bennie. He felt for Michael’s pulse. They lifted the stretcher on to a trolley and wheeled it along a passage into a surgical ward. No one stopped Bennie and she followed.

  Another trolley already prepared for giving a blood transfusion was wheeled alongside. The doctor muttered something to a nurse, who came up with a hypodermic. He injected it Coramine, Bennie thought. While he was doing this a second nurse was taking a sample of the blood too readily available, and she hurried away with it.

  The doctor slit away Michael’s sleeve and stared at the arm, then took a knife from the transfusion trolley and cut through the skin to the flattened vein. He picked up the vein in a pair of fine forceps and inserted his needle; the nurse ran a little of the Universal Donor blood from the bottle to replace the air in the tubing, then made the connection to the needle. The doctor muttered again, and there were a few seconds of complete silence while the blood began to run into the vein. So perhaps it wasn’t too late.

  About two ounces went from the bottle, then the flow seemed to check.

  “Put some pressure on.…”

  The nurse fixed an indiarubber inflating bulb to one of the tubes of the bottle and began gently to pump. The blood moved again; Michael gave a sort of inward sigh. Hope. But the bluish pallor didn’t change.

  The blood moved less quickly. The doctor injected again and waited. One of the ambulance men had noisy breathing, but that was the only sound. It was too much the only sound. Bennie didn’t take her eyes from Michael’s face. It was Michael’s face no more.

  The doctor bit his lip and glanced at the ambulance man with a slight shake of the head.

  Running footsteps, and the first nurse came back carrying a bottle of the correct blood group. She looked at Michael, then she looked at the doctor, and came more slowly in and set the bottle down.

  After a while the doctor straightened up. “It’s no good. I’m afraid he’s gone.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Joanna had thought she couldn’t go on with the play, because something in Don’s voice when he telephoned her had said enough. She thought of pretending to be ill and getting away from the studios, going back to the house and taking her things and being gone before Don came home. But as the memory of his voice slightly faded she began to tell herself that she had imagined half of it.

  When it came to the point the play went through without a hitch; somehow better than usual from her point of view, and when it was over she felt tired out but a bit easier in mind. She came out into the rain of North London still relaxed; but the comfortable fiction that had helped her to go on was no longer with her. She knew Don knew. She was composed because there wasn’t anything more.

  The taxi ride was a long one, and all through it her mind was quiet, not thinking much. Only on her own doorstep did her nerves come awake. She fumbled in her bag, found the key, went in.

  There was a light in the living-room. Did one go in as if nothing … pretend to the last …?

  “Hullo!” she called.

  “Hullo.”

  He was standing by the fireplace, in which a small fire flickered. He was lighting a cigarette. She could have run upstairs, taken off her coat.…

  “So it’s more or less all right about the libel action,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The libel action.”

  “More or less.” He flicked his lighter shut. “How did you know?”

  “The evening papers. ‘Ten Pounds Damages for Shorn. But Sir John Marlowe’s Reputation Cleared.’”

  “Oh. I haven’t seen them.” He looked at the end of his cigarette. “Are you wet?”

  “Not bad. I got a taxi. Will the action cost us much?”

  “Apparently not. We made some sort of a legal move in July in case there was this sort of verdict, so most of the costs fall on them.”

  “Good. It’s so good about your father.”

  She came into the room and fumbled a cigarette out of the box. He didn’t offer his lighter, and she found a match.

  He said: “I’ve been watching your play.”

  She looked up through the smoke. “ Oh?”

  “Henry came back with me after the verdict—stayed and had a drink. When he left I switched on and saw the last two acts.”

  “Like it?”

  “Yes.”

  A brief silence fell, and to cover it she knelt to the fire and began to poke it. “This coal is poor stuff.”

  He said: “I thought you were better than I’ve ever seen you before. You were terrific.”

  “Oh … that’s nice to know.”

  He said: “ I sat here in the dark looking at you, particularly in the close-ups. It was queer.”

  “Was it?”

  “Yes. You looked all that I imagine Fry would want his character to look—seductive, feminine, essentially pure in heart. I sat speculating.”

  “On what?”

  “On all that beauty, all that apparent purity, and wondering how it could hide so much rottenness, so much ugliness, so much sham.”

  In spite of being expected, it was a vile moment.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You should know.”
br />   She stood up. “ Yes … I suppose I do.”

  Neither spoke for a moment.

  “Is that all there is to say?”

  Her intellect, her adultness, blocked each sentence as it came into her mind. “There isn’t anything I can say that won’t sound like a cheap excuse.”

  “Suppose you make the cheap excuses—they may be better than nothing. I want to know in what way I’ve failed you. I want to—just to begin to understand.…”

  She drew at her cigarette as if trying to draw nervous stability from it. “What am I accused of?”

  “Christ!” he said suddenly, savagely. “ You’re accused of nothing. I’m your husband, not the Public Prosecutor. We’ve left the court; remember? We’re not yet in the next one. I only want to know why. Why, while my back was turned, did you give yourself to—to Roger? Roger of all people. Am I a failure to you sexually?”

  “No.”

  “Or morally, or some other way?”

  “No.”

  “Is Roger more fun?”

  “No.”

  “Or are neither of us sufficient on our own? Which of us is the second string?”

  “Stop,” she said breathlessly.

  He waited. “ Well?”

  She made a big effort to be calm. She put her hand on the mantelpiece.

  “Don, I told you: I’m not making excuses. I don’t think now it’s any good saying anything at all. The damage is done. But I can say—I can try to say about three things. The first is that Roger was the man before we were married. I thought I’d got him out of my system. I hadn’t. I have now. That’s really about all. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry.…”

  Her mouth was filled with a coppery taste. She groped for reasons she had once found to give Roger, reasons she had given calmly enough then: there weren’t any now. It made a difference talking to the person you’d let down. “It must sound—pretty shoddy to you.”

  “It sounds unconvincing.”

  “But I think you must know one other thing. It began while you were away. It ended before you came back. And I knew nothing about this attack on your father. If he got those letters while he was with me he got them unknown to me.”

  For the first time he looked at her,

  “And these happy meetings you’ve been having with him since?”

  “What meetings?”

  “At the party at the Savoy? At Television House? Were you laughing together at your lovely memories?”

  She dropped the cigarette into the hearth and put her hand up to her face. “Yes, damn you, yes, if you want to think that! What else can I expect you to think! It’s all in the picture, isn’t it? Maybe it’s the right picture! What was it you said: rottenness, ugliness, sham? You saw me tonight didn’t you, looking—looking the way you said, and thought that’s how she’s been looking ever since I came home, lying in my arms, in my bed, and all the time acting like a mongrel bitch, slinking round to Roger when my back’s turned, letting me down, letting me down worse than any common tart! That’s what you thought, wasn’t it!”

  She stared at him, her eyes blazing with tears. His heart twisted inside him.

  “Yes,” he said. “I thought exactly that.”

  “Then what do you want me to do? When shall I go?”

  “Whenever you like. The sooner the better.”

  “I’ll go tonight. I’ll be glad to get out of this sanctimonious atmosphere of——”

  “Sanctimonious!” he said. “ Dear Christ, is it sanctimonious to expect ordinary honesty, ordinary fair dealing, ordinary decency? If you’d wanted to go to him why didn’t you say so? I wouldn’t have stood in your way. You could have——”

  “I didn’t want to go to him! I don’t want to go to him!——”

  He said: “You like it both ways. I don’t. I’m sorry.” That finished it. “Don’t worry,” she said. “ You’ll not be troubled again.” As she got to the door he said: “ I’ll go. I’ll sleep somewhere else

  tonight. You can leave in the morning.”

  She turned. The wildness of narrow temples and fine jaw line

  were like stone from which emotion had eroded the flesh. “Give

  me an hour to pack a few things.”

  He pushed past her into the hall, not intentionally clumsy, but

  uncertain with anger and pain. He looked at her dragging at words

  that lost their meaning before they were spoken and so were not

  spoken and so were not spoken.

  “Good-bye.” He went out.

  The rain had nearly stopped, but after twelve hours everything was sodden; water trickled in the gutters, feet squelched, tyres hissed as if they were punctured, darkness and the sparse lamps turned streets into shallow canals.

  He walked for a time without knowing anything, trying to walk away from the havoc he carried inside him. When she came home he hadn’t intended it to be like that; he hadn’t really; he’d thought that it should at least be civilised and reasonable; yet he couldn’t blame either himself or her for the way it had turned out; there was too much inevitability in what had to be done and said; this was the sure end, the only end. Yet every now and then grief pulled at him like some child neglected for its stronger brothers.

  In the streets there were a lot of people still about; somewhere a clock was striking, but he had neither energy nor interest to see the time; he stumbled on past lighted shop windows where people stopped and gazed. Christmas woollies for the fuller figure. See our Teenage Department. French Empire chairs, Venetian chandeliers. You want the best seats, we have them. Wembley Stadium, Wednesday night.

  He turned off the main road into another side-street. His mind went back now and then to the four-day court action, the remarks of his friends at the end. Did any of them know the real joke of it all?

  At the verdict Roger had smiled his self-contained smile. He had lost morally. He had even lost financially; but that wouldn’t worry him, as The Gazette would foot the bill. In all that he cared about he was complete victor of the field. “Debunking is a disease of civilisation,” he had said at the club. “Modern man likes to think, I’m no good but neither is my neighbour.” What did it matter to him that a few insinuations about a dead man did not stand up? His theory about human nature had been proved completely and triumphantly right.

  What a mess there had been behind the scenes! How Roger must have smiled. Joanna had given herself to gone back to him—gone back to him, if her story was right—while he was away, as coolly, as casually.… Or perhaps not coolly. Roger had only to look at a woman. It was all like an illustrated guide to his belief in the cheapness and vulgarity of life. It made Don’s defence of his father look like the posturings of an indignant cuckold in a Vanbrugh play.

  Well, maybe one had to be everything once. It was certainly something he’d never expected to be. Maybe it was a useful corrective. He was still too ingenuous. You had to get civilised. “I’m no good, but neither is my neighbour.” Lesson one: how to vomit up the over-sweet pap of idealism.

  He turned down a narrow street badly lit at either end. A couple were clasped in each other’s arms in the shadow of a doorway. The conventional posture. Further along a cat prowled round an ashy dust-bin, and another arched its back on a wall. The same preliminaries to copulation. Why in God’s name was one taught to suppose that of two essentially similar acts, the human had the greater significance? Joanna’s view, since she had been carefully tutored by Roger even before her marriage, would no doubt be that her husband was a sap to care. Lesson two was to despise your neighbour and despise yourself; from that all knowledge flowed, and all gratification. Snap out of it, Don, dear, why make a fuss? There’ll be plenty ready to console you; when the candle is taken away every woman is alike.

  He came to the end of the narrow street. He leaned against a wall, out of breath. Cars were passing along a broad street. The red flower of London bloomed in the night sky behind the tall houses; the window squares were like yellow seeds set
in irregular patterns. The glow seemed to be the product of some obscene orchid house in which all the vices were crossed and interbred.

  “All right, mate?” said a voice. A little man in a long coat was looking up at him.

  “I’m—O.K. Thanks.”

  A cigarette-end showed up a round moustached face, bright eyes. “Had a drop too much?”

  “No. It’s not that.”

  “Like me to get you a taxi?”

  “No, thanks. Thanks all the same.” He went on, surprised he had looked so strange that even a passer-by noticed.

  Movement got him no freer of pain. There was no level on which he could see the future. There was no retreat for his mind. The balance of life had been tipped too far.

  He stopped again, staring about him. He was in Belgrave Street.

  It was raining. He hadn’t noticed it until a thin trickle of water slid from his hair inside his collar. This was where Roger lived. It was about eight months since he had been here for a cocktail-party. This no doubt was where Joanna came—when they were not within easy reach of Midhurst. Tuesdays and Fridays for dinner and to spend the night. “ Be civilised, old boy; Victoria’s been dead more than half a century.” What was that Doutelle had said in his closing speech today? Some quotation: “ Who shames a scribbler? break one cobweb through, He spins the slight, self-pleasing thread anew; Destroy his fib or sophistry—in vain, The creature’s at his dirty work again.” Perhaps the real disease of civilisation was civilisation. Men like Roger came to power and influence and fastened their standards on a world too sheep-like and dim-witted to question them. It was time someone questioned Roger.

  The house was easy to pick out because the one nest door to it had been bombed and re-built. Don crossed the street and went up the steps. The door was shut and he pressed the bell over the visiting-card. There was a light on in the hall, and almost at once the door opened. It was Roger himself. He stared at Don as if he didn’t know him.