It's a Battlefield Read online

  ‘I’m a delegate from the garidge. They want to know what’s going to be done about Drover.’

  ‘I’m coming to Drover all in good time,’ Bennett said. ‘There’ll be the petition to sign. Do you expect us to attack the prison? What’s the good of breaking windows? If they want to ’ang ’im, they’ll ’ang ’im.’

  ‘There’s a lot of feeling at the garidge.’

  ‘Then ‘old a meeting at the garidge. Get some of the intellectuals to talk till you feel all right. I’ve got up ’ere to face facts.’

  ‘Something ought to be done.’

  ‘This meeting’s got more to attend to than Drover. Who’s Drover anyway? I’ve never ’eard ’im do anything for the party. We’ve got a big job on now that can’t wait for Drover.’

  Somebody in the middle of the hall called out: ‘Good old Bennett,’ and everybody laughed.

  ‘They’re shouting Drover this and Drover that at me. Drover doesn’t matter now. It’s not one policeman we want to kill. I’m not a talker. I’m the man who does a job. We’ve got enough blacklegs. We’ve got ’em in the party, we’ve got ’em in this ‘all as like as not. Spies and blacklegs. Men who’ve never done a stroke of honest work, talkers, scribblers. We’ve got to weed ’em out.’

  ‘Really,’ Conder said, stroking his head, ‘he’s going too far. He’s questioning our honesty.’

  Kay Rimmer sat with her head on her hands and her eyes on the floor. She thought of the long streets between her and Battersea, the Jews in Charing Cross Road, the whores in Coventry Street, and the long hill of Piccadilly; at the other end, past the King’s Road and the cabmen’s shelters, past the slow dull river and the warehouses and the tram-lines, Milly waited, Milly with her intolerable grief, fear in the kitchen, suspense in the sitting-room, pain on every stair. ‘They’re shouting Drover this and Drover that at me.’ Drover who had never intruded, who had sat as quietly as a visitor in his own home, importuned now from every piece: the plant unwatered, because it had been his job, no beer in the house because he used to fetch it. I want to enjoy myself, she thought, Jim doesn’t matter to me, I could hate Milly for this, and looking up she saw Mr Surrogate’s smooth cheek and pale hair.

  ‘There’s Kay,’ Jules said and waved his hand. He noticed again that she had been crying. Above his head Bennett rumbled on. His rage was like a storm which, if two were together in a room, drew them together with its darkness and the closeness of the air. He allowed himself for a while to think of loving Kay; she was more of an individual with her eyes wet. His mind, which had been misty with regret, vague with aspiration, cleared momentarily, and it occurred to him that possibly all he needed was a woman. Love when one had no money was a chancy thing; one took it when it came, but that was seldom. They were always, women, wanting something in return: a visit to a dance hall, chocolates, a cinema; they thought it undignified to take the pleasure as its own reward; or else they became moony, passionately monogamous, and when he wanted to laugh and love and make a noise, they wanted to be quiet in the dark, alone with him. But Kay was not like that; she had too many friends ever to want to creep into corners; he almost believed that it would be safe to love her. Her tears did not frighten him; they meant that she would be glad of company; he got miserable himself when he was left alone, would have paid anything he had for even Conder’s company, was lost, was frightened. Only a woman, only a noise, only a gramophone playing or people talking could save him then from sinking back, back into himself, meeting his harsh mother on the threshold, back past the moaning drunken cries, back past the quarrels in the next room, back to the kisses and the sweets and early bed, back to no more being. Shout, sing, be in a crowd as he was here; that was better than searching in the dark for something as hopelessly gone as the sheltered existence of the womb. ‘Jules, you have forgotten this. . . . Jules, you have forgotten that. . . . God damn you, how much longer have I got to wait?’ Slowly he would emerge, apologize, explain. They thought, all the employers and the customers he had to deal with, that he was lazy, but he forgot as easily his own affairs, his handkerchief, his coat when it was stormy, and today the letter which had come for him, addressed and re-addressed with a French stamp, only this moment remembered. ‘I’ll open it at lunch-time,’ but at lunch-time a hurdy-gurdy was turning in the street, two children were circling with raised pinafores, an unemployed man was slapping his hands to help them with the time, and Jules could stand and laugh and gossip, feel himself for ten minutes part of the street, part of London, part of a country, not one abandoned by his mother’s death to fight his way in a land which was his only by the accident of birth.

  The surface of the brain was aware of Bennett talking, Mr Surrogate bending his head over his shoe, Kay trying to catch his eye; their images danced across his brain like rain on glass, leaving no impression. He was already away, seeking what he had lost, what he was never quite reconciled to losing, complete dependence, a definite object (to breathe, to grow, to be born), the impossibility of loneliness.

  ‘Come on,’ Conder said, ‘it’s over. I knew they’d do nothing about Drover. They’re good for nothing but talk.’

  ‘Why do you come?’ Jules asked.

  They were pushed together for a moment in the entrance, somebody thrust petition papers into their hands, and they were again apart with a foot of pavement and a splash of lamplight between them. Something in that quick involuntary contact affected Conder; it was as when one shared a taxi with a strange woman after a party and the chance contact induced confidences between a street and a street. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘when everything is badly wrong, even the talk of something better. . . .’ He looked at Jules sideways, with shame, with a sharp hopefulness.

  The street was full of people, laughing and going home. Jules longed to be with them. He said to Conder: ‘There’s Kay,’ and to Kay: ‘This is Conder.’ Conder took off his hat and Kay’s eyes rested with distress, boredom, a veiled malevolence on the bald head.

  ‘Can we see you home?’ Conder asked.

  ‘But I don’t want to go home yet,’ Kay said. ‘It’s early.’ She leant against the lamp-post and pressed her cheek against the iron.

  ‘Come to the park then,’ Jules said.

  ‘It’ll be cold.’

  ‘A café.’

  ‘Both of you come with me,’ Conder said, ‘and have a drink at the “Fitzroy”.’

  ‘I’ve had too many drinks at the “Fitzroy”. Can’t you suggest something new, something exciting?’

  Conder put his hand to his head. ‘I’d ask you to come and have some supper, but you see I’ve got to meet someone at 10.45.’ She smiled with unbelief. Men couldn’t even think of a new excuse.

  ‘We could go to a cinema for an hour,’ Jules said.

  ‘I don’t want to go to a cinema or a café or a pub, and I don’t want to go home and I don’t want to walk about in the park.’ The men stood round her with perplexed irritated faces. They ought to understand, she thought, what home will be like with Milly waiting there, not sleeping, not taking off her clothes, hopelessly entangled with a man who is not there, who will never be there again. She wondered with a kind of vexed sensuality what it felt like to be so tied to a man. These were men, standing round her offering coffee and beer and moving pictures, and never dreaming – you could tell from the dull depressed faces – that the only thing she wanted now, this minute, this night, was the knowledge of what it felt to be so tied to a man.

  Jules said: ‘It’s nearly 10.45, Conder, now.’

  She gazed from one to the other of them, from Conder, short, shabby, with a bald head and ink-stained fingers, and nails blunt from a typewriter, to Jules with the lost look she told herself it would be easy to love.

  ‘Won’t anybody say something funny? I want to laugh.’ She knew suddenly that Jules understood, that if Conder had not been there, he would have made love to her, but this knowledge irritated her and when Conder looked at his watch and said, ‘Yes, really. I must be off,’ she exerte
d all her charms to keep Conder, smiling and pouting, a faint evocation of a famous film actress in a small part in an early faded film. ‘Oh, but I know you just aren’t interested in me. You’ve not really got an appointment.’

  ‘Believe me, Miss Kay,’ Conder said, ‘there’s no one I’d rather stay and talk to, and I hope that you’ll let me call around at the works and take you out to lunch one day. If it wasn’t so important –’

  ‘What is it anyway?’

  ‘Ah, but ladies can’t keep secrets,’ Conder said, bowing impressively. His personalities flickered so quickly that he was himself confused, uncertain whether he was the revolutionary, the intimate of Scotland Yard, or, a new part this, the master spy. He took off his hat and moved quickly round the corner into Charlotte Street, head a little bent, butting against the cold sweep of the wind.

  ‘Kay,’ Jules said.

  ‘Look,’ she said quickly, ‘there’s Mr Surrogate.’ Mr Surrogate came out of the cinema alone, paler than when he entered. He had shut himself into a lavatory until he thought the place was clear, for he was unwilling to encounter Bennett. It would arouse bad feeling, he told himself, the party mustn’t be split into groups; and at intervals, hearing feet prowling round the wash-basins, he had pulled the chain convincingly. His face clouded when he heard his name spoken, but it cleared again at the sight of a girl under the lamp-post. He padded deprecatingly across the pavement. It was quite like the old days of the Fabian Society. ‘Well, Comrade? What about a cup of coffee?’ He looked at her more closely. ‘You are the girl who cried.’

  ‘Jim Drover’s my brother-in-law.’

  Mr Surrogate was taken aback. Drover was a sacrifice, Drover was a comrade, on Drover’s death the British Communist Party would come of age. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He felt rattled and betrayed by the individuality of men.

  ‘You needn’t for me,’ she said. ‘It’s my sister who’s hurt. I hoped I’d have some news for her. I don’t want to go home and say there’s nothing going to be done.’

  ‘The party can do nothing,’ Mr Surrogate said.

  ‘I’m afraid of what Milly will do. She’s a quiet one. You don’t know what she’s thinking. But I know they were happy. They were so dull together, they couldn’t be anything else but happy.’ Mr Surrogate nearly called to her to stop. Pain was unbearable to him. His nerves shrank from it. He remembered with longing the bare panelled walls of his flat, the glow of the gas fire, the mirror and the Adam mantel. Only one suffering individual penetrated there, and she was dead and could be dismissed and forgotten with a book.

  ‘They’d been married five years.’

  ‘Listen,’ Mr Surrogate said, ‘there’s still the petition.’

  ‘She doesn’t believe in that.’

  ‘There are things one can do – privately. People one can see. I’ll speak to Caroline Bury.’

  ‘If only there was something I could tell Milly.’

  ‘There shall be, I promise you.’ Somehow the promise of the evening must be re-established, drawn away from suffering. ‘Come back with me now and we’ll discuss it.’

  ‘Shall I?’

  ‘Go along, Kay,’ Jules said. He hoped that Mr Surrogate would invite him to go with them; he too wanted to do something for Drover; he would enjoy a party instead of bed, a little drink, a lot of talk, and after they had discussed what to do, a little music. But his encouragement angered Kay. ‘It’s too late,’ she said.

  Mr Surrogate was taken aback; he had forgotten in his resistance to pain that she was a girl, someone with whom he could discuss the old burning question of the Emancipation of Women. ‘These bourgeois ideas,’ he said. ‘I’m surprised.’ He waved to a taxi.

  *

  Conder opened the smoking-room door; in a corner the genteel woman in black velvet sat as usual beside a table of bottles. Over the fireplace hung a photograph of an admiral with a blasé face and a tilted cap; a plaque on the walls stated that a naval officers’ club had met in the room between 1914 and 1918.

  ‘Anyone asked for me?’ Conder asked.

  ‘No, Mr Simpson’s not been in tonight, nor Mr Barham, Mr Conder. We’ve been quite quiet.’ Her genteel voice made the words sound like ‘quack, quack’.

  ‘I’ll look in the bar.’ Conder went downstairs. But he did not open the bar door, for through the glass he saw Bennett. His back was turned and he had lifted a glass of bitter to his lips. His friends crowded the bar and the noise of their laughter peopled the stair, so that Conder stood for a moment very still, feeling himself the centre of a hostile crowd. The outer door opened, and a large man in a soft hat came in; he wore ordinary clothes like a disguise. ‘Hallo, Mr Conder,’ he said. Conder jerked his finger to his lips. ‘Shsh,’ he said, and retreated up the stairs. ‘Shsh.’ The large man followed him; he took a long look into the bar on the way. ‘What’s got you?’ he said.

  ‘I’ll tell you in a moment. Have a drink? You’re late.’

  ‘How nice to see a new face,’ the woman in black velvet said.

  ‘Two Basses,’ Conder said. The woman trailed back to her corner, an empty bottle in either hand, with the manners of an Edwardian hostess.

  ‘What’s got you?’ the man said, and raising his glass, ‘Here’s how.’

  ‘Look here, Patmore,’ Conder said, ‘you may get me into trouble. Bennett’s downstairs. He’s spoiling for trouble. If he saw me with you –’

  ‘Why, Mr Conder, can’t you entertain a friend?’

  ‘There are only two things, Patmore, you could possibly be, one’s a policeman and the other’s a bailiff.’ The thought of Bennett in the bar frightened and irritated him. ‘I’m tired to death, Patmore, of you fellows at Scotland Yard. You’re a lot of ostriches burying your heads in the sand, thinking you aren’t noticed. You’ve released Ruttledge. You haven’t an idea about the Streatham Murder. The only man you can get is a poor devil like Drover.’

  ‘You wanted to talk to me about that, Mr Conder?’

  ‘And the Assistant Commissioner. . . . He may know how to hang a few natives in the jungle, but he’s no good for London.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say you were wrong about him, Mr Conder. There are a lot of us at the Yard who don’t like him. The trouble is he wants to know too much. He won’t leave things alone. The Yard’s a complicated place. You can’t know it all. You can’t know all there is about finger-prints if you are going to know all there is about blood tests. He won’t understand that. He wants a finger in every pie. F’rinstance, Mr Conder, it would surprise you if you knew where he was tonight. It’s his own fault if he gets himself hurt one of these days.’

  Conder put down his glass suddenly, and the beer slopped over on to the marble top of the table. ‘What’s that?’ Somebody fell up the stairs. ‘For God’s sake stop talking shop, Patmore. They are coming up.’

  The woman in black velvet frou-froued to the door. ‘Quaietly, quaietly, Mr Rowlett,’ she breathed to somebody outside. A flushed young man came in. ‘Look here, Miss Chick,’ he said.

  ‘It’s nace to see your face,’ Miss Chick said.

  ‘The fellers pushed me from behind. They’re all drunk in the bar. Ought to call a policeman.’ He stared at Patmore with a glazed eye and then went out again hurriedly. ‘You oughtn’t to think any harm of him,’ Miss Chick said, trailing back to her corner and the beer bottles.

  ‘It’s not safe here, Patmore,’ Conder said. ‘That man Bennett is a suspicious creature. He’d never understand there was no harm in my meeting you.’

  ‘All I want to know, Mr Conder, is what was said about Drover tonight.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We want to know what’s thought about the case.’

  ‘There you are again. That’s Scotland Yard all over. You go on worrying about a man you’ve got, but you don’t know from Adam who cut up Mrs Crowle. I tell you, Patmore, a journalist sees a lot, but that trunk gave me the biggest turn of my life. Old-fashioned, the kind of thing my mother used to take to the sea, and inside thic
k with blood. Blue stripes like a shirt and thick with blood.’

  ‘I could tell you something about that, Mr Conder. We aren’t as slow as you think.’

  Conder sipped his beer, his bald gleaming head bent; for a moment he forgot Bennett while he followed a story through the dark streets towards Euston in the wake of a fast car. ‘You go and release Ruttledge just because of a few finger-prints.’

  ‘We had no call to keep Ruttledge.’

  ‘You go on worrying about Drover.’

  ‘That’s what I want, Mr Conder. Just what did happen tonight about Drover? There were speeches of course, but was anything arranged? Any demonstration? Any propaganda? How did they take it?’

  ‘You are asking a great deal, Patmore,’ Conder said. ‘You are asking me to betray my friends. Two more Basses, Miss Chick.’

  ‘It’s just an exchange of stories, Mr Conder. I’ll be able to give you a first-class sensation for your midday edition.’

  ‘You can promise that, exclusive, for certain?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Conder.’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you. Surrogate spoke and Bennett spoke and someone from the garage tried to speak. That’s all. Nothing’s going to be done about Drover. Everyone’ll sign the petition, of course. But you can take it from me, Drover’s forgotten. He’s as good as taken the drop already. What they are interested in is this fellow at Aldershot who’s been given two months for distributing papers. They’ll make the hell of a noise about him.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Conder. That’s all I wanted to know.’

  ‘Well, then, drink up your Bass and come away.’

  ‘How are the children, Mr Conder?’

  ‘The children – oh, the children. They’re all right. That’s to say, one of them has whooping cough.’ While Patmore drank his beer, Conder enlarged his tale, the new home, the defective bathroom; every word, every phrase, every fake image was an indictment, an indictment drawn with care to allow no loophole for an acquittal, against life, life without children or wife or home.