As an undercurrent to her thoughts there was the knowledge that she had not troubled her head about Mother and George – Mother had spent last night in prison, in a cell, with the shadow of the gallows hanging over her as for two and a half days it had hung over George. But this was only the undercurrent. It was Derrick and Anne that she was thinking about. Her misery was intensified by the fact that she could not imagine at all what had happened to them, could not visualize for a moment in what circumstances they were awakening this morning. The dread word ‘Institution’ came up into her mind. The word bore with it associations of bad food, harsh treatment, cold and draughty rooms. Little Anne would shrink within herself in such a place, enduring it in uncomplaining distress, but Derrick would protest, would struggle, would refuse to put on the harsh Institution clothes, would voice his dislike of the Institution food, until some hateful wardresses, tight lipped and dry eyed, would punish him, suppress him, crush him into dazed submission from which he would never emerge again, not even in manhood.
‘Oh God!’ she said. She would have blasphemed more wildly if the words had come to her lips; she was full of an unvenomed rage at a world which would allow such things to happen. ‘Oh God!’
And she was full, too, of a bitter contempt for herself that she had left her children to suffer this, and had not given them a minute’s thought in all these hours. There was no self-pity in her now. She could see herself as she was, weak, easily dominated, and yet selfish. In her black misery she blamed herself for everything that had happened, with no thought for Ted’s responsibility.
‘Time to wake up, now, young woman,’ said Millicent, bringing the table to the bedside, the china clinking cheerfully.
‘I don’t want any breakfast – I can’t eat any,’ said Marjorie. She sat up in the bed, her hair wild, with no thought for the shoulder of her nightdress which had slipped down.
‘Nonsense, of course you can. Start with a cup of tea,’ said Millicent with determined cheerfulness. She had been aware of the new misery that was afflicting Marjorie; she even had come near to guessing its cause, and she had known that no more mere words on her part could combat against such realities. All she could do was to offer a cup of tea.
‘It’s the children!’ said Marjorie.
‘I’m not going to talk about anything like that until you’ve had your breakfast,’ replied Millicent firmly. ‘Toast or bread and butter?’
Millicent held on firmly to trivialities. Her welfare work at the factory had accustomed her to doing this. Confronted with a crushed finger or a broken heart the first remedies she brought forward were always a cup of tea and an interval of small talk. They gave a breathing space in which to recover sanity. She did the same instinctively now, fighting down the dread feeling that this time she was in an impasse from which there was no escape at all. She was playing bravely for time, for she could see no solution of Marjorie’s difficulties save one, and that she dreaded.
‘I don’t think,’ she said, holding up the milk bottle to the light ‘the milk’s nearly as good now as when they first began putting it in bottles. There’s not half the thickness of cream on top now. Have you noticed it?’
It was a subtle lure. Ten years of domestic preoccupations asserted themselves. Marjorie could be inveigled into discussing domestic economy. They talked sanely for a few minutes, the clatter of the teacups accentuating the homeliness of it all.
And then an abrupt knocking at the door burst the fragile bubble.
‘What’s that?’ gasped Marjorie. She was a white as death on the instant.
‘Oh, nothing,’ said Millicent. She was frightened, too, but she brought herself to face the inevitable. Calming herself with an effort, she made herself walk stoically to the door and open it.
‘Oh, good morning, Mrs Hardy,’ she said. The manageress stepped quickly into the room, while Marjorie cowered in the bed. Mrs Hardy included her in an all-embracing glance round the disorder of the room.
‘I have to draw your attention,’ she said, icily, ‘to the terms of your agreement, Miss Dunne. One condition of tenancy here is that only the tenant is allowed to sleep in a single flat. If you expect to have friends staying with you you must take a double one.’
‘Oh, I forgot that,’ said Millicent. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Hardy.’
‘You must see that it doesn’t occur again, Miss Dunne.’
Mrs Hardy made a dignified exit, and Millicent hastily locked the door again behind her.
‘Do you think she saw me?’ asked Marjorie. ‘Has she gone for – for –’
Millicent’s frantic appeal in dumb show for silence checked her before she could say more. Millicent knew that someone listening at the door had reported to Mrs Hardy that she was violating her agreement by having someone spend the night with her, and Mrs Hardy herself might be listening now. They were both of them trembling.
Marjorie saw how shaken Millicent was, saw her white cheeks and trembling lips and the sight cleared her brain like a fog rolling off a landscape. The card-castle of the illusion of ordinary security which had been built up during the five minutes before Mrs Hardy’s knock had fallen, but to Marjorie now it was no more than the fall of a card-castle. She had no tears to shed over the ruins. Nothing worse could ever happen to her now than had happened so far. She flung back the bedclothes and stepped out of bed.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have come here. It wasn’t fair to you. You don’t want to be mixed up with a woman like me.’
Marjorie had looked upon herself in various lights before, as Marjorie Grainger, Mrs Edward Grainger, as Anne’s and Derrick’s mother, as Mrs Clair’s daughter. To herself she had been one or other of those during the days of flight. Now she saw herself with clarity as ‘a woman like me’, as a suspected murderess, an adulteress. She was fantastically unafraid of what they might do to her. The calm of resignation descended upon her, the same which often enough in history has supported martyrs on their way to the stake. Mrs Hardy’s knock, Millicent’s distress, had proved the last straws in the load of misery which she had so far borne. She could bear it no more. She looked round the room for her clothes. This newfound clarity of mind did not extend to mundane details. She fumbled as she sorted out her underclothes; she turned distractedly to the washbasin, and confronted by the mirror over it she put up her hands instinctively to her hair.
‘What are you going to do?’ whispered Millicent, staring at her wild-eyed. Her professional calm was gone now.
‘I don’t know,’ said Marjorie. She laughed, a little high pitched. Perhaps she was hysterical; perhaps at that moment she was mad. ‘That woman’s settled it for me. I can’t bear any more of this.’
She rinsed her face with cold water and dried it with a towel. Nearly naked, she found herself reaching for her hat and handbag, and laughed again. Millicent stared at her fascinated as she pulled her vest over her head, and slipped into her dress.
‘Marjorie,’ she said ‘you’re not going to – to –’
Millicent feared lest she was going to kill herself, but the thought was so far from Marjorie’s mind that even Millicent’s unfinished question suggested nothing to her.
‘I’m going out of all this,’ said Marjorie. ‘They can do what they like to me. I don’t care.’
She was pulling on her stockings now, sitting on the edge of the disordered bed.
‘The children,’ said Marjorie meditatively as she did so. ‘I’m sorry for the children.’
There was deep pity in her voice as she spoke, heartfelt and sincere, and yet unmaternal. Marjorie did not belong to this world any longer.
‘I can look after the children,’ said Millicent, eagerly. ‘If – if they need looking after. I’ll see they’re all right. I’ll be good to them.’
‘Yes,’ said Marjorie. ‘You always were fond of Anne. You liked her better than Derrick even. You’d be a good mother to them. You know about children al
though you’ve never had one yourself.’
She stood up with her hat in her hands.
‘Marjorie!’ said Millicent again. ‘What are you going to do?’
The only answer she had was the same laugh. Perhaps it was the cessation of tension consequent upon the new state of mind which set Marjorie laughing, shrill and soulless though her laugh was.
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Millicent desperately, and that did something to make Marjorie a little more human.
‘No!’ she said. ‘I won’t let you. You’ve had enough trouble from me as it is.’
Millicent caught at her hand, but Marjorie shook herself free, twirled herself out of reach, twirled herself past Millicent towards the door, and laughed again triumphantly.
‘Goodbye, dear,’ she said. That inhuman tenderness flooded her voice again. ‘Goodbye, darling. You’re a dear love, Mill, dear. Goodbye.’
She unlocked the door and passed out into the corridor while Millicent gazed at her helplessly, with dropped jaw. It was five seconds before she ran out after her, and in that five seconds Marjorie was gone.
Out in the street, at this late Sunday morning hour, Marjorie breathed deep and freely, turning up her face to the sky. There was a light rain falling; she hardly noticed it. She was free now, free of all apprehension or doubt. It was good to be in the street, to breathe fresh air after the stuffiness of Millicent’s room, to be able to look all down the length of the road instead of having her view confined by four narrow walls. That was all she wanted at the moment. She was conscious of nothing save the pleasant sensation of walking briskly and breathing deeply.
There was nothing of consciousness to guide her now. She was an automaton in charge of her instincts, and her instincts drew her homewards, inevitably. For nearly ten years she had lived in the house in Harrison Way, and it was to that house that she directed herself. Old associations of ideas, reasserting themselves, may have quickened her step with the anticipation of seeing her children again, her husband, the old familiar furniture, so dead was her conscious memory. She found herself amid a group at a bus stop, and automatically boarded the bus. She found silver in her handbag to pay her fare. Not even the twisted bundle of one pound notes which her mother had thrust in there – only yesterday! – could rouse her from this new, strange indifference. The rain was heavier when she alighted at the High Street corner, and the streets were empty in the wet Sunday noontide. She walked briskly up the steep slope of Simon Street, revelling in the feel of the raindrops on her face. She turned down into Harrison Way.
Sergeant Hale emerged from No. 77; he was going to have his dinner, and he was leaving a constable in charge of the house. There were newspaper reporters who would pull the whole place to pieces if he did not, so great was the thirst for news regarding this business. His morning’s search had failed to throw any new light on the death of Edward Grainger – though in a case as clear as this nothing much in that way was to be expected – nor had it given any further indication as to where Mrs Grainger was likely to be found. Sergeant Hale had no doubt that she would be found speedily, all the same. He was glad when his duty kept him at No. 77, because, as he said to himself ‘They often come back.’ He would not have been in the least surprised if she had walked in that morning.
At the gate, still considering this point, he looked up and down the road before setting out towards his home. He saw her walking down towards him, and hurried to meet her. She looked up at him and smiled, amazingly, at being thus welcomed. Before that smile Hale blushed and stammered like a boy as he loomed over her. Like a schoolboy struggling with stage fright in some school play he uttered, disconnectedly and in an artificial tone, the words that placed her under arrest and cautioned her as to what she might say. The caution was justified. It awakened one tiny fragment of Marjorie’s sleeping memory. Millicent had said ‘Never tell anyone else about what your mother said as you walked up Simon Street.’ That was the only thought which moved at all amid the stagnation of Marjorie’s mind as she submitted to Sergeant Hale, and it was that which saved her, later.
Mrs Posket, at her bedroom window, was looking gloomily out into the rain. She had come back from her holiday yesterday when everything was over and done with. It was infuriating to think what she had missed. Murders and arrests and escapes had happened within fifty yards of her home without her being there to witness them. Silly little Mrs Taylor had been there, had tales to tell of police whistles heard in the night, had been interviewed by reporters, had been right in the thick of it, while she was absent. Mrs Posket was beside herself with annoyance. But determinedly she had tried to make the best of things. Yesterday, at the moment of her arrival home, she had managed to get hold of Sergeant Hale and make the obvious corrections in the absurd description of Mrs Grainger that Mrs Taylor had supplied. Now she was sitting at her window hoping to retrieve some new fragment of the wreck. Her optimism was well-founded, for from her bedroom window, almost outside her front gate, she saw something which would supply her with funds for conversation for the rest of her life. She was the only eyewitness to the arrest of the notorious Mrs Grainger. To accentuate the importance of this, in her subsequent descriptions of it, she always maintained that of course Mrs Grainger was certainly guilty, and that the jury’s verdict was utterly incorrect. Not many people agreed with her.
A Note on the Text
Hollywood, 1935: The young C. S. Forester is offered a contract to write a film script. He had previously come across some late eighteenth-century volumes of the Naval Chronicle and after the Hollywood contract, these accompanied him on his sea-journey back to England via Central America. The result: the first Hornblower novel.
Forester missed England during his stay in California. Not foreseeing the pressure that would grow on him to write more Hornblowers, he now wrote a classic London thriller about murder, sex and revenge, The Pursued. In his personal notes, Forester refers to it as ‘the lost novel … It was written, sent to London and Boston, accepted and made the subject of signed agreements’.
But the Spanish Civil War intervened. Forester now went to Spain and the Peninsular War of 140 years previously stirred his interest. With a new sense of excitement he realized that this could be a second Hornblower novel.
Forester wrote ‘It would not be fitting for The Pursued to be published between these two [Hornblower] books’. After ‘a long and solemn telegram from Boston’, publication was delayed. ‘The lost novel was really lost. It is just possible that a typescript still exists, forgotten and gathering dust in a rarely used storeroom in Boston or Bloomsbury’.
Oxford, 1999: I assist Dr Colin Blogg in founding the C. S. Forester Society, in appreciation of the author’s narrative skill, his flawless English prose and his studies of ‘the Man Alone’, set against well-depicted contemporary backgrounds. I had been reading Forester since schoolboy days, went on to read English at Oxford and was confirmed in my estimation of this great writer. So when an unpublished Forester novel appeared in a small auction in London we were determined to acquire it. Colin and I are now owners of the script bearing the typist’s name.
London, 2011: Penguin Books (which now owns Forester’s old publishers, Michael Joseph) arrange publication of this little masterpiece of London life between the wars: The Pursued – so very nearly, the One that Got Away. An extraordinary find and a rare first view of one of the great English twentieth-century novelists at the peak of his powers.
Lawrence Brewer, Peopleton, 2011
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First published in Penguin Classics 2011
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ISBN: 978–0–141–97134–6
C. S. Forester, The Pursued
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