At the end, when we can go away, they will have exonerated us. Until then, we are pilloried. And after?
The woman on the bus—there’s one of them! Aren’t you one of the fellows who was in those stables? And then the spit, incompetent spitting, badly aimed, hanging on the sleeve of his heather-mixture greatcoat—We did nothing! It was a kind of praying!
There was a crowd round a shop. Drawn as he always was, despite himself, to this extension of a place and time, he stopped and stood at the back. By dodging this way and that, he could contrive to see brokenly into the window where at least fifteen television screens were showing their identical pictures; and then he saw a smaller one, high up and at an angle, so he ceased to dodge.
It was the afternoon round-up, he saw. There was a split screen, Mr Justice Mallory and his two coadjutors occupying the bottom third of it, and the smoking school above it, now a very famous film indeed. Athough he had never seen the school itself in the days when it had stood untouched and dignified, he could nevertheless identify the various windows from which various children of this royalty or that princedom or that multinational had jumped or been thrown. The top picture changed. Now it was harking back to London airport—there was Toni, her hair dazzling, there was the young ex-officer (that hurt) who had been her accomplice; there, close to him and at the wrong end of his pistol, the weight-lifter who had been engaged to the other sister—was he part of it? It was unbelievable—what was which and who? There was the plane taking off—the picture changed again and with a dull pain at his heart he saw what was to come. The bug was looking down into a small room where three men were sitting round a table. One of them was writhing and then suddenly laid his head down on the table. Their hands were joined. The man opposite lifted his head and opened his mouth.
The film cut to the inquiry again, everybody laughing, the judge, legal persons, press and those odd bodies whose function he had never quite understood, and who were perhaps special agents as a back-up to the armed soldiers who stood here and there against the walls. There was another cut, back, this time, the film of the three men in slow motion, his own head bowing jerkily, then Edwin’s mouth open—and this time the people who stood round the shop window were laughing like the men in the inquiry.
“It wasn’t like that!”
Fortunately no one noticed. He hurried away, not able to bear the thought that he might see once more (it was such a popular item) his own evidence that Mr Justice Mallory had described as a moment of low comedy in this terrible affair—
“You say, Mr Goodchild, you were not in a trance?”
“No my lord. My hands were held and I was trying to scratch my nose.”
And then the roars of laughter, on and on—oh, it must have been for whole seconds.
I wouldn’t believe it myself. I wouldn’t believe we were—are—innocent.
I heard her in the street, the other woman nodding and talking at the same time the way they do, there’s no smoke without fire that’s what I said. Then they both shut up because they saw me.
The tube was roaring and crowded with rush-hour traffic. He hung on a strap, keeping his head down, looking where he would have seen his feet if a man’s stomach hadn’t got in the way. It was almost restful to hang there with no one to recognize the fool.
He walked from the station, coming up out of the earth to the street with a sense that once more he was vulnerable. Of course we all had something to do with it! We were there, weren’t we?
The man who looked like an accountant but was from the secret service or whatever they call it, the one who did the bugging, said they’d been on to her sister for nearly a year. Who used who?
I had nothing to do with it. Nevertheless I am guilty. My fruitless lust clotted the air and muffled the sounds of the real world.
I am mad.
In the High Street he walked straight and painful, tense. He knew that even the brown women, cloth drawn across the lower part of the face—but in his case as he passed, drawing it higher still, to avoid contamination—even the brown women looked, glinting sideways.
There he goes.
Even Sandra looked. She came fatly, clumsily, but all gleaming and alive with excitement—“My mum wants me not to come but I said as long as Mr Goodchild wants me—”
Sandra wanting to be connected with terror, no matter how far off.
There was a sound of rapid footsteps beside him that slowed to his pace. He glanced sideways and it was Edwin, chin up, fists driven together in the pockets of his greatcoat. He wove a bit and brushed Sim’s shoulder. Then they walked on, side by side. People made room for them. Sim turned into the lay-by where he kept his van. Instead of walking the few steps to Sprawson’s, Edwin came with him. Sim opened the side door and Edwin followed without saying anything.
In the little sitting-room behind the shop there was dim light. Sim wondered whether to pull the curtains aside but decided against.
Edwin spoke in little more than a whisper.
“Is Ruth all right?”
“What is ‘All right’?”
“Edwina’s with her sister. Have you heard where Stanhope is?”
“Staying at his club, they say. I don’t know.”
“Some newspaper’s got Sophy.”
“‘He stole my heart away, says terrorist’s twin.’”
“You’re moving I suppose.”
“Selling to the shopping-centre people.”
“A good price?”
“Oh no. They’ll pull the place down and use the ground for access. Big firm.”
“Books?”
“Auction. Might make a bit. We’re famous for the time being. Roll up!”
“We’re innocent. He said so. ‘I must state here and now that I think these two gentlemen are the victims of an unfortunate coincidence.’”
“We’re not innocent. We’re worse than guilty. We’re funny. We made the mistake of thinking you could see through a brick wall.”
“I’m being encouraged to resign. It’s not fair.”
Sim laughed.
“I should like to go to my daughter, get the hell out of it.”
“Canada?”
“Exile.”
“I think, Sim, I shall write a book about the whole affair.”
“You’ll have the leisure.”
“I shall track down and cross-examine everybody who had anything to do with the whole ghastly business and I shall find out the truth.”
“He was right, you know. History is bunk. History is the nothing people write about a nothing.”
“The Akashic records—”
“At least I’m not going to make the mistake of fooling with that kind of idiocy again. No one will ever know what happened. There’s too much of it, too many people, a sprawling series of events that break apart under their own weight. Those lovely creatures—they have everything—everything in the world, youth, beauty, intelligence—or is there nothing to live for? Crying out about freedom and justice! What freedom? What justice? Oh my God!”
“I don’t see what their beauty has to do with it.”
“A treasure was poured out for them and they turned their back on it. A treasure not just for them but for all of us.”
“Listen!”
“What is it?”
Edwin held up one finger. There was a noise, someone was fiddling with the door of the shop. Sim jumped up and hurried forward. Mr Pedigree was just closing the door behind him.
“We’re not open. Good day to you.”
Pedigree did not seem so defensive.
“Why was the door open then?”
“It shouldn’t have been.”
“Well it was.”
“Please leave.”
“You’re in no position, Goodchild, to come the heavy. Oh I know it’s only an inquiry, not a trial. But we know, don’t we? You’re in possession of my small property.”
Edwin pushed past Sim.
“You’re an informer, aren’t you? You did it, didn?
??t you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That’s why you wouldn’t stay—”
“I went because I didn’t like my company.”
“You went to switch the bug on!”
“Edwin, does it matter? That secret service man—”
“I said I’d get the truth!”
“Well. I want my ball. There it is, on your desk. I paid for it. Matty was really honest, you know.”
“Just a moment, Sim. We know why you want it don’t we? Do you want to go to jail again?”
“We might all go to jail, mightn’t we? How do I know I’m not speaking to a very clever pair of terrorists who put those girls up to it? Yes of course she was—as bad as the other! The judge said you were innocent, but we, the great British Public, we—how odd to find myself one of them!—we know, don’t we?”
“No, Sim—let me. Pedigree, you’re a filthy old thing and you ought to be done away with. Take it and go!”
Mr Pedigree gave a kind of high whinny.
“You think I like wandering round lavatories and public parks, desperate for, for—I don’t want to, I have to! Have to! Just for, no not even that, just for affection; and more than that, just a touch—It’s taken me sixty years to find out what makes me different from other people. I have a rhythm. Perhaps you remember, or are you too young to remember, when it was said that all God’s children had rhythm? Mine’s a wave motion. You don’t know what it’s like to live like that, do you? You think I want to go to jail? But every so often I can feel the time coming, creeping up on me. You don’t know what it’s like to want desperately not to and yet know you will, oh yes you will! To feel the denouement, the awful climax, the catastrophe moving and moving and moving—to know that—to say to yourself on Friday it may be, ‘I won’t, I won’t, I won’t—’ and all the time to know with a kind of ghastly astonishment that on Saturday you will, oh yes you will, you’ll be fumbling at their flies—”
“For God’s sake!”
“And worse; because many years ago a doctor told me what I might become in the end, what with obsession and fear and senility—to keep some child quiet—do I sound verging on senility?”
“Give yourself up. Go to hospital.”
“Only they did it while they were young. Willing to kidnap a child—not worrying who got killed—imagine it, those young men, that beautiful girl with all her life before her! No, I’m nowhere near the worst, gentlemen, among the bombings and kidnappings and hijackings all for the highest of motives—what did she say? We know what we are but not what we may be. A favourite character of mine, gentlemen. Well, I won’t thank you for your kindness and hospitality. I’m sorry we shan’t meet inside—unless of course they turn up more evidence.”
They watched him in silence as he wrapped his coat round him, held the big, coloured ball to his chest, and went with his curious springy, tottery step and let himself out of the side door. A moment or two later he shadowed the chinks of boarded-up shop window and was gone.
Sim sat down at the desk, wearily.
“It can’t be happening to me.”
“It is.”
“The real hardship is that there’s no end. I sit here. Will they ever stop showing that film of us round the table?”
“Have to, sooner or later.”
“Can you stop watching it when it’s on?”
“No. Actually not. I have to, like you. Like, like—no, I won’t say like Pedigree. But every newstime, every special report, every radio programme—”
Sim stood up and went into the sitting-room. The sound of a man’s voice swelled and the screen flickered into brightness. Edwin stood in the doorway. They were going through it all again on the other channel. The shot of the school appeared, was panned slowly, to take in the shattered and smoke-blackened wing. Then, endlessly after that, were Toni and Gerry and Mansfield and Kurtz herding their hostages towards the plane; and again, as a preliminary, before the day’s advance, the new News, there was Toni in Africa, broadcasting, beautiful and remote, the long aria in that silvery voice about freedom and justice—
Sim cursed at her.
“She’s mad! Why don’t people say so? She’s mad and bad!”
“She’s not human, Sim. We have to face it at last. We’re not all human.”
“We’re all mad, the whole damned race. We’re wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we’re all mad and in solitary confinement.”
“We think we know.”
“Know? That’s worse than an atom bomb, and always was.”
In silence then, they looked and listened; then exclaimed together.
“Journal? Matty’s journal? What journal?”
“—has been handed to Mr Justice Mallory. It may throw some light—”
Presently Sim switched the set off. The two men looked at each other and smiled. There would be news of Matty—almost a meeting with him. Somehow and for no reason that he could find, Sim felt heartened by the idea of Matty’s journal—happy almost, for the moment. Before he knew what he was about he found himself staring intently into his own palm.
Mr Pedigree, wearing his ancient pepper-and-salt suit, had the overcoat slung over one arm and carried the ball held between his two hands on his way to the park. He was a little breathless and indignant at his breathlessness because he traced it to the talk he had had a few days before with Mr Goodchild and Mr Bell—a talk at which he had voluntarily spoken about his age. Age, then, had leapt out of its ambush somewhere and now went with him, so that he felt in himself even less able than usual to cope with the graph of his obsession. The graph was still there, it was so, no one could deny it, how else do you find yourself at that time of autumn when the day is still warm but these evenings suddenly cold—how else do you still find yourself going towards, despite the desperate words spoken only an hour before, and not just then but here and now as feet took themselves along despite you—no, no, no, not again, Oh God! And still the feet (as you knew they would) took you along and up the long hill to the paradisal, dangerous, damned park where the sons of the morning ran and played—and now, with the still open iron gates ahead, his own breathlessness seemed to matter less; and the fact, the undoubted fact already standing there, that he would spend tonight in a cell at the police station and overwhelmed with that special contempt they did not feel for murderers—that undoubted fact which he tried to rely on to support the ‘no, no, no, Oh God!’ that versicle without any response, the fact was diminishing in importance and was now overlaid quiveringly with an anticipation that really, one could not disguise it, tended to promote the breathlessness of age, not old age, but age, none the less, or its threshold as he said Tηλἱκου ὣσπερ ἐγών—
Still breathing deeply, astonished and sad, he saw his feet move him forward now again up the steep lip of his obsession, up to the gate on to the gravel, the feet themselves looking, peering at that far side where the boys shouted and played—only half an hour and they will be home with mum. Only another half hour and I would have held out for another whole day!
A wind took a scurry of autumn leaves across his feet but they ignored them and went on fast, too fast—
“Wait! I said wait!”
But it was all reasonable. Only the body has its reasons and feet are selfish, so that as they tried to pass the seat he was able for a while to arrest them and he pulled the coat round him, then slumped on the iron slats.
“Overdone it, you two.”
The two did nothing inside their shining boots and he came to himself a little, feeling sheepish and wrapped in a cloud of illusion. Heart was more important than feet and protested. He hung over it, hoping that something nasty was not going to happen with its thump, thump, thump; and as he detected the first slowing of the beat he said inside, not daring even to risk giving the words air, since air was what heart wanted and must have to the exclusion of any other activity—
That was a narrow escape
!
Presently he opened his eyes and made the brilliant colours of the ball take firm shape. The boys would not stay at the farther end of the park. Some of them would come this way, they must, to get to the main gate, they would come down the road and they would see the brilliant ball, bring it back to him when he threw it—the ploy was infallible, at worst would lead to a moment’s banter, at best—
A cloud moved away from the sun and the sun itself seized him with many golden hands and warmed him. He was surprised to find how grateful he was to the sun for his mercy and that there was a little while to wait until the children came. If thought and decision was an exciting affair it was also a tiring one, hysterical sometimes and dangerous. He thought his heart would be the better for a little rest until he had to go into action, so he nestled into the huge coat and leaned his head down on his chest. The golden hands of the sun stroked him warmly and he was conscious of sunlight like waves as if someone were stirring it with a paddle. This was impossible of course but he was happy to find that light was a positive thing, an element on its own and what was more, one lying very close to the skin. This led him to open his eyes and look about. Then he discovered it was a function of this sunlight not merely to soak things in gold but also to hide them for he seemed to be sitting up to his very eyes in a sea of light. He looked to the left and saw nothing; and then to the right and saw without any surprise at all that Matty was coming. He knew this ought to surprise him because Matty was dead. But here Matty was, entering the park through the main gate and as usual dressed in black. He came slowly to Mr Pedigree who found his approach not only natural but even agreeable for the boy was not really as awful to look at as one might think, there where he waded along waist deep in gold. He came and stood before Pedigree and looked down at him. Pedigree understood that they were in a park of mutuality and closeness where the sunlight lay right on the skin.
“You know it was all your fault Matty.”