It's a Battlefield Read online

‘I wanted to talk to you,’ Milly said. She followed her into the narrow hall and closed the door behind her. Mrs Coney looked up at her with sudden bright relief and said: ‘I thought it was the Press again. I couldn’t stand – have they been at you, too?’

  ‘No. My man’s still alive, you see.’ Milly, five feet four inches high, towered over the woman.

  Mrs Coney said nervously: ‘You’ll have a cup of tea. Excuse the untidiness. I’ve been cleaning up.’

  One side of the passage was packed with occasional tables. Two or three ferns stood on the floor and the carpet had been taken up. The air was full of floating dust. ‘Would you mind the kitchen?’ Milly noticed everywhere the signs of a fussing and incompetent woman, a woman who drives the dust from one room to settle in another, who buys Danish eggs for economy and leaves the gas burning.

  Milly said with sudden anger: ‘I haven’t come here to say I’m sorry.’

  Mrs Coney whipped round from the gas stove, kettle in hand, scattering drops over the linoleum. She said in a frightened voice: ‘It must have been all a mistake. I’m not blaming you.’ She put the spluttering kettle back on the stove and began to drop tea into the pot.

  ‘He was only defending me.’

  ‘I’m sure he was.’

  ‘You’ve put in six spoonfuls.’

  ‘Oh, dear, it will be strong. Do you mind it strong?’ She sat on the other side of the kitchen table staring at Milly with her little finger crooked away from the teacup. ‘You’re older than your husband?’ Milly asked.

  ‘Ten years,’ Mrs Coney said. She said weakly: ‘I always thought he’d catch me up, that I’d be gone first. I didn’t think I’d ever be left alone.’

  ‘It feels odd, doesn’t it?’ Milly said.

  ‘Odd? I keep on going into rooms and coming out again. I can’t settle. Would you like a piece of cake, dear?’

  ‘It’s good of you,’ Milly said, ‘treating me like this,’ but she knew that Mrs Coney’s goodness, her white brow and cameo brooch and air of frightened rectitude, meant nothing at all. It was only her surroundings which lent her an air of positive virtue. Mrs Coney was encircled by death and crime and implacable justice; even pallor and hesitation and a commonplace kindliness gained dignity from those surroundings.

  ‘I was so afraid it was the Press, dear. They brought great noisy cameras and told me to speak to them. They said they were going to put me on the films,’ Mrs Coney said with pale astonishment, thinking of campuses and cocktail parties and orgies in Imperial Rome.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I didn’t know what to say. So they told me to say something about demanding justice,’ Mrs Coney added with an air of shame and fear, peering at Milly over the brim of her cup and blowing on the tea to cool it. It occurred to Milly how easily the whole affair could have been settled between them. Mrs Coney did not want vengeance, she did not want another woman’s husband slaughtered because she had lost her own; they were two women of the same class who could talk things over and come to an understanding. It was gentlefolk who had broken in with the laws they had made themselves, earning the fees they had fixed themselves, hundreds of pounds going into their pockets while the trial went on. A death for a death – the law demanded this, but the law had not been made by Jim or Mrs Coney or herself, it had been made by kings and priests and lawyers and rich men. Sometimes they let you off, but the decision would not be made by Mrs Coney; again, it would be the politicians and the lawyers who knew nothing about the man they saved and cared less. Somewhere, at some time, in a newspaper or a book, Milly had read the words, ‘Judgement by your peers’. She had thought it meant judgement by your lords and had been laughed at for thinking so, ‘It means judgement by your equals’, but where, she asked now of Mrs Coney, was a judge who was their equal, a man with three pounds a week, who lived as they lived? And the jury? Tradesmen and gentlemen. It wasn’t fair, Milly said, with her tea and Mrs Coney and the long walk home forgotten in a sense of stifled injustice.

  ‘It’s the law,’ Mrs Coney said, blowing into her tea with her little finger crooked.

  ‘They’re hanging him on Thursday.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, dear,’ said Mrs Coney. She was inadequate to anything but submission. ‘Arthur was always hot-tempered. He hit me sometimes.’ Her small jet eyes closed for a moment and she gripped the edge of the table as though with an intolerable longing for a blow.

  ‘I’ve brought a petition paper,’ Milly said. ‘Will you sign it?’

  Mrs Coney’s eyes flashed open. She was suspicious and defensive. ‘I don’t like signing things. What does it say?’

  ‘You don’t want me to read all the rigmarole,’ Milly said. ‘It’s asking the King not to have Jim hanged.’

  Mrs Coney’s shoulders twitched, her chin went back, and she raised the teapot. ‘I don’t like to trouble His Majesty,’ she said. ‘He’s got enough to think of. Some more tea, dear?’

  ‘He won’t see it,’ Milly patiently explained. ‘It goes to one of those people in Parliament.’

  ‘I don’t like signing things,’ Mrs Coney repeated. ‘Arthur never liked me signing things. If you sign things when people come to the door (I don’t mean you, dear), you don’t know what you let yourself in for – vacuum cleaners, wireless, bedroom suites. Arthur always said, never put your name to a printed form.’

  ‘I’m not selling anything,’ Milly said. ‘You can read it all if you like.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not accusing you, dear, but it just makes one careful. I can’t read it without my glasses.’

  ‘Let me read it to you then.’

  ‘Couldn’t you leave it behind and I’d ask Arthur’s brother, and then I’d post it to you?’

  ‘No,’ Milly said, ‘there isn’t time. Listen. You don’t want Jim to be hanged?’

  ‘He ought to be punished,’ Mrs Coney said.

  ‘Oh, he’ll be punished all right. Eighteen years in prison. Don’t you call that punishment?’

  ‘I don’t like to sign anything without asking Arthur’s brother. But you can tell them that I don’t want him hung.’

  ‘That’s not enough. Please, Mrs Coney,’ but she realized too late that begging would get nothing from the meek suspicious woman. Mrs Coney for the first time in her life was tasting power. Though submission had always satisfied her, there was something in the novel taste which thinned her lips. But she could not fight straightforwardly. Her spirit, like a mole, burrowed circuitously in darkness, emerging at unsuspected places. ‘I don’t believe in interfering with the law.’

  ‘This isn’t interfering with the law. It’s got nothing to do with his politics. Don’t think I’m a Red. If he hadn’t been one, he wouldn’t be in trouble now.’

  ‘What? Is he a Red? I wouldn’t raise a finger to save a Red.’ It was odd to hear somebody you knew as well as your own body labelled with the same badge as a lot of other men. Milly protested: ‘He’s never done anybody any harm.’

  ‘Oh, but if he’s a Red. They want to take everything away from us. You oughtn’t to have asked me. You ought to have known better. Thieves.’ Mrs Coney glared round the kitchen, noting everything which she feared to lose – the silver-plated napkin-rings, the christening-mug on a shelf, the carved Swiss bread-board, and through the door, in the passage, the ferns and the wooden bear and the two umbrellas, but yet beneath the fear and the hate, the same inner submissiveness, so that anyone watching her might know that they could steal with impunity. She would hate them, their hands on the rings; she would talk at them, the Swiss bread-board in their sack; but she would never fight for her possessions.

  Milly said: ‘You’ve got to sign.’

  Mrs Coney replied stubbornly with one hand spread over the top of the teapot: ‘I’d do nothing for a Red.’ She was as unconcerned by argument as a dead woman, a woman happy dead, who feared the removal of the nails which pinned down her coffin-lid. ‘They want to take everything. One’s not safe.’

  ‘He’s your own class,’ Milly
said.

  ‘He’s not my class. My Arthur would have been an inspector one day.’ Her dead Arthur climbed and climbed through the otherwise empty space of her mind, his uniform changing as he climbed, first stripes appearing, then braid. Presently his helmet vanished and a cap appeared – the making of a man.

  ‘Then you won’t sign?’

  ‘No. At least – not until I’ve spoken to Arthur’s brother.’ She jumped as a small bell ping-pinged above her head. She had never got accustomed to the suddenness of an electric bell; in the old days the quiver of the wire all down a passage gave warning. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘dear, won’t you answer it?’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘I can’t bear their cameras,’ Mrs Coney said. ‘Send them away. I’ve got nothing to tell them.’ She remembered, pleading with Milly through her small eyes, which had no more expression than a pair of jet bugles, the day of her husband’s death and how the news had been told her at the door in a polite, kind, patronizing voice, while before she could recover and recognize the tripods on the pavement her bewilderment and horror had been caught by their lenses and reproduced as staring stupidity. ‘Tell them I’m not in.’

  Milly got up. All down the passage she thought hard; she waited for a moment beside the wooden bear and then opened the door. A man with a bald head took off his hat and said: ‘Mrs Coney?’

  ‘Wait there,’ Milly said and turned down the passage. He followed her quickly, walking on the tips of patent shoes. She rounded on him and he watched her, hat in hand, with an expression of persistent humility. ‘I said wait there.’ Milly knew that her voice had nearly broken. If she could not win her battle soon, she would give in; she was not used to fighting, she had always relied on Jim to do the fighting, putting out drunken neighbours, pushing a path for both of them through the crowd at fun fairs.

  ‘Excuse me,’ the man said softly, turning on his heel. ‘I misunderstood’ – walking back to the door; but Milly was aware, when he stopped for a moment by the bear and tapped it on the skull with his knuckles, of his interior hardness; this was what one laid oneself open to when one became news, soft-spoken strangers in the house who touched and felt and criticized and never said a word of what they thought.

  She closed the kitchen door behind her and said: ‘It’s a newspaper man.’

  ‘Did you tell him I was out? Has he gone?’

  ‘I told him to wait.’

  ‘Why do you hate me?’ Mrs Coney said and began to cry. She sat bolt upright in her chair, her eyes as expressionless as ever; like the plaster cast of a statue to rectitude with water dripping down the face. She took out a gay lace handkerchief and dabbed at her cheeks.

  ‘When you’ve signed this. I’ll send him away.’

  ‘He won’t go.’

  ‘I’ll make him,’ Milly said.

  ‘You’re a wicked woman. I haven’t a pen.’

  ‘Here’s a pencil.’

  ‘I believe you planned it all.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Milly said. ‘I’m not that clever. It’s luck. It’s the first luck I’ve had since your man tried to hit me.’ She began to cry herself with bitter joy, seeing the scrawl across the printed form, ‘Rose Coney’, thinking I’ve done something for him, I’ve fought for him, I’ve been of use to him, full of gratitude suddenly to Conrad, who had helped her to this relief, grateful to all the world except Jim’s enemies. ‘I’d do as much for you,’ she said, ‘if I could. But your man’s dead. He can’t be helped. Mine can. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do.’

  The man was back in the passage. He had picked up a vase and was looking at its underside. ‘Mrs Coney?’ he asked again.

  ‘No. She won’t see you.’

  ‘I don’t mind waiting.’

  ‘I shouldn’t wait if I were you. You may miss a story if you wait.’

  ‘Oh, I’m used to waiting,’ he said. He became confidential, while he moved up and down in the hall, lifted a pot of ferns, tapped a vase, put his finger in the bear’s mouth. ‘I’ve never got anything in any other way.’ He raised a face like a square façade with all the windows shuttered, life hidden from the street, going on in twilight in the quiet rooms. ‘Would she mind if I smoked?’ He lit a cigarette and stroked a green leaf. ‘She ought to give them tea. This bear came from Switzerland. Cunning little teeth it’s got.’ He spoke in a sad quiet way. ‘I’ve seen a room of these things. Everything’s carved wood. At the Schaffhausen falls. They all played a tune too. Wastepaper bins, cigarette boxes, chairs, fruit dishes. And the cuckoo clocks cuckooing all the time.’

  ‘Aren’t you going?’

  ‘I’m used to waiting. I shouldn’t be surprised if this bear played a tune if one knew how.’ He rapped it again on the skull.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ Milly said, but the man fascinated her. He had told the truth when he said that he was used to waiting. He was so practised in waiting that he seemed to want nothing else but to stand there feeling things and talking to anyone who would listen. But he was not sociable. It was only one way of passing the time. He was not thinking about her, but of something quite different. If I were not here, she thought, he would sit down and go to sleep.

  ‘Ah,’ the man said, ‘I’ve got it.’ He picked one of the umbrellas from the bear’s embrace and a musical box in the bear’s belly began to play a very simple jingly tune. ‘It brings it all back,’ the man said, not troubling to raise his voice; she could only hear what he said when the tune sank a little. ‘Disappointed – long drive – wet – without a handkerchief – three shillings for tea – no lavatory.’

  Milly said: ‘But you must go. I promised that you’d go.’ The tune came to an end, the cylinder of the musical box whining and grinding in the wooden stomach. ‘Nobody can steal your umbrella anyway,’ the man said, beginning to prowl again. ‘Now is this the late Mr Coney?’

  Milly said: ‘I’m Mrs Drover.’

  He showed no surprise. ‘You know Mrs Coney?’

  ‘No, but I came here to ask her to sign the petition.’

  He watched her, his eyes round and melancholy and uninterested. He gave the impression that all human stories were often repeated and that it was his unfortunate fate to listen to every repetition. ‘Ah, you’ve got nerve, and did she?’

  ‘I’ll tell you that if you’ll come away with me.’

  He put on his hat, gave the bear a final rap and opened the door. ‘She ought to give those ferns tea.’ Without turning to see whether Milly was following him, he began to walk down the hill between the chocolate-coloured residences. ‘Perhaps I’ll call back and tell her so, and perhaps I won’t. Her story’s dead. No more interest. Don’t think I can offer you any money for an interview. I can’t. The manager would have a fit. That’s a nice house there.’

  Milly followed a little behind him. Her achievement shrank with every pace he took. ‘I don’t know what paper you are,’ she said. ‘But I can try another one. I don’t want money anyway.’

  He became brusque. ‘Ah, you’re another one of them. “All I want is justice.” All, think of that. As if justice were a pound of tea, as if it existed anywhere, as if –’

  ‘I don’t want justice,’ Milly said. ‘I’ve seen enough of it. I was in Court every day.’

  He stopped and leant against an estate agent’s board and watched her with a thin flicker of interest. ‘And did she sign the petition?’

  ‘I’m not going to tell you unless you’re interested,’ Milly said. ‘I want publicity.’

  ‘Is that all?’ he asked sarcastically, but she did not recognize his sarcasm. The world to her still seemed a simple place; one wanted things and they were given or denied, one was happy or unhappy, loved or hated. She had lived at one remove; she had never been close enough to life to see the confusing details, to learn that one was miserably happy, that a giving was sometimes a denial, that one loved and hated for the same reasons. ‘Yes, that’s all,’ she said. Publicity for the moment was all she wanted; she would have surrendered money if she had had it, h
ealth if it had been required of her, friends if she had had them. ‘I’ll go to another paper,’ she said.

  ‘You’re too innocent to be about alone,’ he said. ‘They won’t be any more interested than I am. You may as well tell me. It’ll be worth a paragraph, I daresay. Perhaps two. I’ll squeeze it in somewhere, I promise you.’

  ‘Will you write it out, the promise?’ He laughed at her as he leant back against the notice board, blocking out some of the large white capitals ‘To Let’ with his hat, and again she was troubled by a sense of complexity because he did not seem to be laughing at her but at himself. She wished that she had Kay with her to deal with him. As the thought crossed her mind, he surprised her by saying, ‘I’d never have recognized you. You aren’t a bit like your sister.’

  ‘Do you know Kay?’ She added quickly, ‘It’s not that I wouldn’t trust you, but I daren’t take a chance. You see, it’s for my husband.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I’m not offended. But your sister would know that writing a thing doesn’t make it any more true. You’re talking to a man who knows.’

  He watched her. She was puzzled and disheartened. She didn’t know what he was talking about.

  ‘What a fool,’ he said, ‘to go and get into trouble and lose a nice girl like you.’

  ‘It wasn’t his fault. We were happy. It doesn’t pay to be happy. I always told him it couldn’t go on, but somehow we couldn’t help it.’

  ‘My name’s Conder.’

  ‘Mine’s Milly.’

  Conder said: ‘Come and have some coffee with me in town. Then you can tell me about Mrs Coney. I’ll do my best for you. I really will. I’m a married man myself. I’d like to talk to you about my kids. One’s got whooping cough. Inconvenient because we’ve just moved into a new house.’ He began to walk rapidly down the hill towards the bus stop, talking and talking, of the wife, of the children; he escaped in a torrent of words from a Swiss umbrella-stand, and from the girl who laughed at him ten years ago by the Schaffhausen falls – ‘You funny little man,’ as he grabbed at her dress in the summer-house (one franc to see the falls through green and pink and mauve glass) while the multi-coloured water foamed and rocked outside and the cuckoo clocks sounded from the chalet and all the fruit dishes played tunes. He complained of his fictitious comfort, spoke bitterly of his fabulous happiness, and by the time the pirate bus had swerved to the kerb and away again with its contraband cargo, his discontent was as unreal as his world.