The Tumbled House

  Don’s nerves bunched in the pit of his stomach. “ I’ve come to talk to you.”

  “Oh,” said Roger. “I was—just going out … I—could you get me a taxi, Don?” His voice was hoarse.

  Don said: “What the hell are you talking about!” He pushed Roger back and followed him into the hall.

  In the light he could see that Roger had just been sick. There were stains down the front of his suit, and the smell. Roger said: “I can’t talk now. I’ve just heard Michael’s dead.”

  In the rain, as usual, there were no free taxis. They stood there on the pavement together not speaking. Roger had brought his umbrella but did not open it. The clammy darkness enveloped them both. Don remembered once when he had stood like this with his father when he was home from school during the blitz, and someone stopped a car nearby and said to them: “They’ve dropped a stick in Baker Street, there’s a score of people buried.” Then the man had driven off, and one of his tyres was on the rim and he didn’t seem even to notice.

  Roger raised his umbrella and a taxi stopped. Don said: “ I’ll come with you.”

  They got in. It was no distance; they could have walked. Lights and shadows moved constantly across them in the taxi like accelerated seasons of day and night.

  Roger said: “ I don’t understand—what I could have done.”

  “What?”

  “One tries … I should have been able to prevent it. I—gave him too much rope too young.”

  Don stared out of the window. For him there was only silence in this moment, neither sympathy nor reproaches were in order. Death was an event, a road-block, that got in your way. For the moment you could only acknowledge it, not feel it or understand.

  But Roger was talking. Sentences kept coming through a sort of protective filter that Don’s mind had put up. Roger was talking as if he’d forgotten there was any wrong between them. Whatever touched his own life at the moment was what mattered; even the tragedy of Michael had to be related to himself; the personal pronoun kept repeating. It was not until they were near the hospital that Don realised Roger was talking only because he couldn’t make do with silence, because he was on the verge of some sort of break-up Thoughts were scurrying in his head like rats in a burning barn; they’d get half out, then be pushed on, all hurried panic.

  Someone had left an evening paper in the car. “ Jury Retires”, said one headline. “Judge Sums Up in Marlowe Case”. The taxi came out the wrong way, and it had to make a complete circle of Hyde Bark Corner. Before it stopped Roger was fumbling with the door.

  They got out and Don paid. Roger stumbled over the step and a porter caught his arm.

  “I’ve come to see my son.”

  “Yes, sir, if you’ll ask at the desk.”

  “He’s—dead. Shorn is the name.”

  “Oh, yes, sir.… Would you wait here a moment, sir? I believe there’s a young lady still here, in the waiting-room.”

  Don came up behind Roger and saw him for the first time in a good light. Roger smiled. It was a sick sweaty smile that left Don unarmed.

  Bennie came down the passage. Her eyes were enormous. Her skirt and stockings were stained with blood and there was a smear of it on her cheek. A nurse was with her.

  She said: “I’m glad you’ve come.”

  “Where is he?” Roger said.

  “If you’ll follow me, sir,” said the porter.

  Don put his arm round Bennie. She laid her face against his coat.

  Roger said: “Were you with him all the time?”

  “No.”

  “I went round to see him last week, asked him.… I thought he looked ill but.…”

  “He wouldn’t go to hospital before because he was afraid of getting into the hands of the police.”

  Roger leaned on his umbrella. “ The police.… He should have told me.”

  The porter was waiting. Roger seemed unable to move, as if Michael’s death was still a premise in his mind and not an acknowledged fact.

  “You’ll be all right now, miss?” said the nurse.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  The nurse smiled at Don with professional sympathy. “ I gave her a cup of tea. She should go home, get those things off, go to bed with a hot-water bottle.”

  “I’ll see she does,” said Don.

  “No,” said Roger. “I’d—like her to come with me if she can—if she will.”

  “Should she?”

  “I’ll go, Don. I don’t mind.”

  “Then I’ll come too.”

  They followed the porter down passages to the mortuary chapel. Michael was lying on a trestle table covered by a sheet. The porter stood by the door. Don and Beanie followed Roger about half-way and then let him go up to the body alone.

  He pulled the sheet back. Michael looked deader than any man Don had seen before. In the faintly-coloured chapel with its window and its cloths his face had a grey pallor that was luminous. He didn’t even look young. Already he was beyond time.

  For a moment it was as if they were all three in sudden personal contact with the central reality and paradox of life, at once dignified and derisory, around which all human activity circles and eventually stops short.

  Roger stared at his son. Somewhere a dock was chiming again. Roger took out a handkerchief and gently brushed a smear of dirt off Michael’s face. Then he smoothed Michael’s hair away from his forehead. After a time he put back the sheet and lifted the handkerchief to his own eyes.

  Don took Bennie home in a taxi. She was calm enough. Before they left she told Roger and two hospital officials all she knew, and she gave them the money in her bag. In the cab she asked about the libel verdict, whether on the whole he was satisfied. Don said, yes, he was satisfied.

  When they got to her flat Pat Wilenski wasn’t in, and Don said, “Why don’t you come home with me?”

  Bennie said, “ No, I’d rather stay in my own place. Really.”

  Then when they got upstairs she suddenly began to shiver. Don went into her bedroom and lit the gas fire and came back to find her in an armchair with her head in her hands trying to keep still. There was no whisky in the house so he gave her gin almost neat. The shivering seemed to stop for a bit, then she began again, like someone with malaria. Don filled a hot-water bottle and put it in her bed. When she still sat there he picked her up and carried her into the bedroom. She sat on the bed and he began to undress her.

  When he was unfastening her suspenders she said: “Don, I can’t let you——”

  “Dear Bennie, don’t be a fool.”

  Somehow be got the sticky frock off. One knee and leg was stained right up to the thigh, but he rubbed her gently with a towel. Her skin gleamed palely as he managed to get her nightdress over her head while she slid out of her girdle. He got her in bed with the bedclothes tucked in round her chin, and she looked at him with enormous eyes and half smiled and tried to stop her teeth from chattering.

  He went into Pat’s bedroom for aspirin and when she had taken some of these she quieted down a bit. He sat beside the bed and held her hand.

  He said: “ Relax.”

  “Uh-huh. D’you want to go?”

  “No, of course not.”

  Silence fell. He could tell by her hand how she was going on. For a rime it would be quiet, and then it would grip his again. The last time he had held her hand was when she was about eleven. It still felt the same.

  They had left Roger at the hospital with the casualty officer. After seeing Michael, Roger had pulled himself together. There would be bad moments later, but he had somehow got round the worst moment of all.

  Before they left Don was alone with him for a few moments and Roger for the first time seemed to realise exactly who he was. “You—were coming to see me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it about Joanna?”

  Don shrugged. There wasn’t anything to say now.

  “Are you … breaking up?” Roger said.

  “Yes.”

  Roger m
ade movements of the mouth before speaking. His face was ugly with fatigue.

  “If you’re going to try and destroy her for the sake of your own pride, that’s all that’s necessary, isn’t it, to—to fill in the last square?”

  A nurse pushed a trolley between them.

  Roger said, speaking almost to himself: “ Yes, that about ills in the last square.”

  The others had come back then. As he sat in Bennie’s bedroom Don thought over it again. Was it true, what Roger said? Or if monstrously untrue, was there even a worm of reason? Was he in any way, even in the smallest way, throwing up his marriage because of his pride?

  No, not so. His marriage was a write-off before ever Joanna came back tonight. It was over before he even came home from Canada. Perhaps it was lost before it began. Roger and Joanna had been together before he knew them. That sort of link didn’t break; it was a trip-wire; an outsider only sprawled in the mud.

  “I led Kenny to Michael, Don. That’s what I can’t forget. I led him there. I——”

  “Don’t think of it now.”

  “But if I hadn’t gone.…”

  “Thinking of it doesn’t do any good, Bennie. You——”

  “You see, in essence, it all comes back to me. He was doing it for me. If I had acted differently I could have stopped him, because he wouldn’t have had the need.…”

  There was music in the flat opposite. Someone was having fun. There were men’s voices and a woman’s high giggle. Don wondered where Joanna was now. She would have left their house, probably be at a hotel. Unless, not knowing of Michael, she had gone straight to Roger. Maybe she would be able to comfort him. ‘Roger was the man before we married. I thought I’d got him out of my system. I hadn’t. I have now.’

  I have now. So she said. I didn’t want to go to him. I don’t want to go to him.… The last square. That fills in the last square.

  His hand moved in Bennie’s.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I—thought I heard someone come in.”

  “Pat always whistles.”

  Time passed. A car stopped opposite and its door was slammed tinnily. Somebody shouted: “Well, if it isn’t Oscar and Pam!” Don looked at his watch. Only ten-thirty. Since ten-thirty this morning was a year. He had lived through fevers of pain and anger and murdered love. In Bennie’s bedroom stockings were hung on a piece of string by the window; the sleeve of a brightly-coloured blouse showed through a slit in the wardrobe door. French magazines on top of a B.E.A. bag. She too had her day.

  Perhaps the commonest failure of human-kind was lack of imagination. How often in two years had he thought of his sister in terms of her own personal life? How often did anyone make the effort? If that was true between him and Joanna, then it was inexcusable. But it could not be true, it wasn’t true. It certainly wasn’t true.

  Bennie said: “Why don’t you ring Joanna?”

  He started. “What d’you mean?”

  “Well, won’t she wonder where you are?”

  “No. No, it’s, all right.”

  She moved her hand free of his. “ Darling, I think you must go.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, in the end, sometime, I’ve got to face this alone.”

  “It need not be tonight.”

  “It’s queer,” she said. “ When I first met Michael it didn’t mean much to me. It did to him; but not to me. Now, in a few months.… Now even the word ‘alone’ means something different from what it has ever done before.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Pat came in at eleven and Don left soon after. It was not very far, and he walked. The fine drizzling rain wet his hair once again, cooled the heat of his face. There was still a fair buzz of traffic. As he turned in by Harrods he realised perhaps for the first time what “ alone” was going to mean to him.

  Trevor Square was quiet and damp, and the gas lamps flickered over the railings and the parked cars. He went up the steps and let himself in before he saw a light in the bedroom. He stopped in the hall. His heart thumped once, and then he thought, she forgot to switch it off when she left.

  Even this typical absent-mindedness struck at him. She would be adding needlessly to his electricity bill for the last time

  He went upstairs. Joanna was standing by the bed fastening a small suitcase. Her delicately strong face looked paler than usual; otherwise it might have been any other evening.

  She looked at him, jerked her head back to clear her hair from her forehead.

  “You’ve missed your train.”

  “What train?”

  “For Edinburgh.”

  The concert tomorrow. “ Oh God,” he said, dropping his hands. “It never entered my head.”

  “It’s too late now. You couldn’t get to the station in ten minutes.”

  “It can’t be helped. There’ll be an almighty fuss but it can’t be helped.…” His sensations at finding her here had frozen on finding her here. “ I thought you would be gone by now.”

  “I went. I got a room at the Hyde Park Hotel. Then I came back.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t worry—not for long. I’ve just put some things in your bag.”

  “Kind of you,” he said coldly.

  “Wasn’t it? I thought you’d be sure to remember the concert.”

  “No.… Even music takes second place sometimes.”

  “There’s another train at eleven-fifty-five. You’ve missed your sleeper, but you could get there in time for rehearsal.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I phoned just now.”

  He stood there trying to weigh up the cool unfriendly look of her, trying to beat his brain into some sort of decision. He felt as if all love and hope and faith had been squandered today and nothing was left but the atheism of staying alive.

  He said: “Michael’s been killed.”

  “Michael! How?”

  He told her in a few sentences.

  “Poor Bennie!”

  “Yes. That’s where I’ve been.”

  They talked warily for half a minute.

  “I’ll go and see her in the morning.… Such a pointless—futile thing to happen.”

  “Most things are.”

  Another silence.

  She checked the other lock of the suitcase. “ You’ve forty minutes to catch your train. I think I’ve packed everything you need.”

  Don put a hand down the damp front of his jacket. “You’ve put in a suit?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thanks.”

  She moved to go past him. This was the last moment. If he didn’t speak now the line didn’t go any further. “Joanna, in what way did I most fail you?”

  She smiled coldly, wearily. “ Darling, I shall think you’re being mock-humble, putting it that way round.”

  “I’m not being mock-humble, I’m trying to rationalise what otherwise makes nonsense of life altogether.”

  Her eyelids flickered. “You can’t rationalise, Don. That’s the first mistake. Life isn’t rational. At least, mine isn’t. Women—don’t make patterns—we—we cross the road on impulse, without looking both ways.…”

  “Yet I have failed you,” he said. “I suppose I’ve missed the mark by letting other things sometimes take first place.”

  She said: “You’ve missed the mark in one thing only—in expecting too much from me. I warned you of that.”

  “You did. More than once. I suppose I didn’t realise it was on quite such basic points.…”

  She rubbed her cheek. Feeling was coming back to him. Looking at her face and lips and body so close to him, he knew that he still loved her so much that if he didn’t get out of her sight he would hate her again. He went to the suitcase, unclicked it, stared at the things she had packed.

  She said: “ D’you remember once we were talking, and you asked me if I didn’t think your love was equal to the strain of discovering things about me? I said perhaps it would be if you remembered I was your woman, not just
your wife.”

  “What’s that intended to mean?”

  “Just what it does mean.”

  He said: “ I think we’re out of the stage where one can treat morals with a meat axe.”

  “Maybe that’s a pity.”

  A towel was on the floor and he picked it up, put it on a chair. One of the drawers of the dressing-table was open and he tried to close it. He saw that it was nearly empty. The novel she had been reading this week was on the bedside table, a letter in it as book-mark. The photo he’d intended having framed was gone.

  “Don’t you want your lipstick?”

  “Oh … well, if s nearly done.”

  He had forgotten what he was playing tomorrow, couldn’t think. Something of Beethoven, Weber.…

  “The programme’s in the back pocket,” she said.

  He took it out, stared at it. “ Tell me what you mean, Joanna, in plain language. So that a child could understand. I need it that way.”

  Only her hands showed her nerves: they fluttered up to her hair, pushed it away from her face again. “ It’s all in what I said before. But what I said before was meant to explain, not to excuse.”

  “If I’ve failed you, there’s no need for excuse.”

  She said: “You want an honourable woman for your wife, that’s it, isn’t it? It’s not a big thing to ask. Well, I’m not an honourable woman. What more is there to say?”

  “A lot, I should have thought.” He tried to collect his feelings, see them as if they belonged to someone else. “I’m not interested in ‘honourable’ women. I’m interested in you. You—my marriage has meant so much to me that nothing second best by a degree can possibly do. If you are going to go with another man it’s something I can’t stomach for a second, not because of honour or high-sounding things but because of the ordinary things: sex, possession, jealousy and.…” He tailed off. “They don’t sound engaging when you list them but that’s what they are. If you are going to be like that, this is the end, this moment; we go out of the house and go different ways.…” He put the programme back, fumbled the case shut. “ But my marriage has meant so much to me—I can only speak for myself, I can’t speak for you—that nothing about it ought to be allowed to go by default. Nothing that can be said should be left out for reasons of anger, pride—yours or mine—or false ideas of dignity or prudery or—or giving pain.”