It's a Battlefield Page 6

‘The bill, Miss Chick.’

  ‘Good night, Miss Chick.’

  He opened the door; Bennett stood outside.

  It was impossible to tell whether he had been listening. He rocked drunkenly on the landing with his hands in his pockets. Conder heard Patmore inside the smoking-room paying a heavy farewell to Miss Chick; he heard Miss Chick say, ‘It was nice to see you. We are always very quiet here’; he saw Bennett rocking gently backwards and forwards; he was afraid to go on for fear that Bennett would block the way and afraid to stay for fear of what Patmore might disclose. Then Patmore came out on the landing and said in his heavy cheerful way, ‘Sorry to have kept you waiting, Mr Conder. A taking girl that.’ Conder stepped forward, Bennett stepped to one side, Patmore went on talking all the way down the stairs. To Conder it seemed that every word was shod with policeman’s boots.

  ‘Man there seemed interested,’ Patmore said, ‘stared at us all the way down. Friend of yours?’ Conder had never felt so shaken. On the pavement he stood awhile, after Patmore had left him, and tried to light a cigarette, but the match blew out twice between his fingers. Then he felt threatened by the emptiness of the street and ran for the first lighted corner. A bus roared by, its lights vibrating across the blank glass of an unlit untenanted shop. Scarlet strips of paper read, ‘Sale before Lease Expires. Sale before Lease Expires’. He ran a little farther and leant against a shop front. A woman with ravaged restored face said, ‘What’s the hurry, dear?’ and went hopelessly on. ‘Sale’, ran the notice on the shop. ‘Sale. Premises damaged by fire.’ It was a pawnbroker’s and the window was guarded by iron bars. Watches, old bracelets, a clock and china figures, a shot-gun, the shelves marked the devastation of a hundred homes. He was shaken out of his sense of dissatisfied safety; it seemed to him that the street was falling round him in decay, fires and expiring leases and age pitting the face. He was not himself again until, in a telephone booth across the way, he found the number of his news-editor’s house, but with his hand on the receiver, his lips to the black orifice, his heartbeats were normal.

  ‘This is Conder speaking. I’m going to have a lead for the midday. Exclusive. The Ruttledge murder, I think. The Flying Squad went up Euston way. I shouldn’t be surprised if there’s not a first-class story in it. Yes? Yes? No. Will you put in a paragraph about Drover’s petition, keep him alive? They are still interested at the Yard. I don’t know why,’ but he accepted the news-editor’s denial without objection, blown into the ruined street over ten miles of cable: ‘The chief’s not interested in Drover.’

  *

  Mr Surrogate leant comfortably back in the taxi and half closed his eyes. He was settled in the past, a past which held no Bennett or Drover, but did not exclude a young woman shaken against him as the hansom jolted over Chelsea Bridge. ‘Women’s rights,’ he said.

  ‘Surely you don’t hold the old view –’ and a little later, as the taxi crossed Gower Street, ‘Birth Control,’ Mr Surrogate said. ‘We must have clinics,’ and he laid a friendly hand on Kay Rimmer’s knee. A street lamp shot a ray of light into the dark interior, and Mr Surrogate, catching a glimpse of her smiling expectation, withdrew his hand suddenly. One mustn’t be rash; it was so easy to be misunderstood; and he trod very softly ahead of her up the stairs to the first floor of the converted house, afraid that the landlord might appear out of his sitting-room by the entrance. He was glad that Davis slept out.

  ‘I live all alone here,’ Mr Surrogate said, a little stiffly and sadly, ‘my wife is dead.’ He switched on a light and the white walls rose round him. ‘Have a nut while I light the fire?’ He knelt and the gentle hissing flames sprang from his match-end.

  ‘It’s lovely here,’ Kay Rimmer said. ‘What a lot of books you have.’

  ‘Those are my own,’ Mr Surrogate said.

  ‘It must be wonderful to write.’

  ‘One tries to exert an influence. Would you like to see the flat? It’s small, but choice, I think. Of course,’ Mr Surrogate added with lowered respectful voice, ‘it lacks the female touch. A man’s den.’ But the word den was a shocking misnomer; Mr Surrogate went from room to room switching on the lights, and everywhere he went white panelling, cream walls, pale jade walls sprang, like sentries, to attention. He never looked round; he was aware behind him of her dumb approval. No woman’s taste could have been more adequate; the few objects which broke the bareness of the drawing-room and dining-room were chosen with an impeccable appreciation: a papier-mâché tea-caddy, a glass painting, a slender painted Empire table in the jade room. Mr Surrogate padded ahead, switching on the lights; he drew attention to nothing; with his smooth blond head deprecatingly bent he might have been the humble custodian of his treasures; no one could have guessed the fierce smothered pride which bowed his head in recognition of his own perfect taste.

  ‘My bedroom,’ he said a little drily, opening a pink door, turning on several lights. Kay Rimmer gave a gasp of pleasure at the rose hangings, the semi-circular bed, the silk bedspread like a waste of fallen petals.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, catching sight of the great mirror with its deep reflections, which flattered her more than a soft-spoken man. ‘Oh,’ she said again at sight of the only picture on the walls, ‘how lovely. Who’s that?’

  Mr Surrogate answered without looking: ‘My wife.’ It faced the bed. It was the first face he saw in the morning. It greeted him, before Davis, with its beauty and its malice and its integrity.

  ‘How you must have loved her,’ Kay Rimmer said softly, under the spell of the face, and for a moment Mr Surrogate longed to tell the truth, that it was hung there as an atonement for his dislike, as a satisfaction for his humility, because of its reminder of the one woman who had never failed to see through him. ‘Let me show you the kitchen,’ he said quickly.

  The kitchen was like a snowdrift with its white casement and white dresser and white table and enamelled gas stove and its deep blue walls and ceiling. The lights in the back rooms of the houses opposite glinted on the walls; a car complained in the mews between. ‘You can see what everyone’s doing,’ Kay Rimmer said, standing at the window. Through the chink of the curtains on a top floor she saw a woman brushing her hair; a great double bed waited for its inhabitants; a maid laid breakfast; a man wrote letters; a chauffeur lent from the window of a little flat above a garage and smoked his last pipe.

  ‘Everyone doing something different,’ she said, her eyes going back to the double bed and her thoughts on the pink bedspread in the other room and Jules and half a loaf is better than no bread and the lovely dead indifferent woman on the wall. Her body was ready for enjoyment; the deep peace of sensuality covered all the fears and perplexities of the day; she never felt more at home than in a bed or a man’s arms.

  *

  Conrad Drover, attaché case in hand, walked all the way to Battersea. He could not bring himself to spend any pence on bus or tube that might be spent on his brother’s petition. His brother was the only man he loved in the world, and his brother for the first time in his life needed him; strength for the first time needed brains. Before it had always been brains which had needed strength, cleverness which had needed stupidity. All the way down Oakley Street and along the Embankment a child ran scurrying to the corner of the playground where his brother beat a ball against the wall; the trams came screeching like a finger drawn on glass up the curve of Battersea Bridge and down into the ill-lighted network of streets beyond; on the water the gulls floated asleep. Into the darkness of the secondary school Conrad fell, alone without his brother, his name tossed across the asphalt – ‘He’s called Conrad, Conrad, Conrad.’ His brother sat in a steel cage driving through the rain; he earned three pounds a week; Conrad sat at a desk aware of the hatred behind him, in the school, in the office; the cold recognition of his efficiency through the glass door of the headmaster’s room, of the manager’s room; Conrad earned six pounds a week.

  The cold railings round the Battersea Polytechnic touched the backs of his hands; Conrad Drover
walked on towards the woman he loved more than any other woman. He opened the letter from his brother at his desk and read with despair, ‘married on Tuesday’; it was weeks before he realized that Milly had not robbed him of his brother’s stupidity and serenity and strength.

  A notice on the railings said: ‘It is forbidden to throw stones at the Polytechnic.’

  There was nothing that either of them had ever been able to do for his brother; they had come together in their admiration and impotence, sitting as it were in his shadow away from the world which rocked and roared around them. Now he was gone and it was they who had to have strength. All day in Court Conrad had prayed that he might be lent stupidity, so that he might not recognize what lay behind the three white wigs, the silk robes, the whispers, the getting up and the sitting down: ‘I submit, m’lud, that if you look at Rex v. Hindle’; the coughing and the complete lack of interest. A child ran into him chasing a ball, and Conrad clutched a railing for support. He thought with bitterness of Kay: ‘The manager would sack me. You are different. You have brains.’ If ever I have a child, he thought, I shall pray that he will be born stupid.

  The oldest judge put his head on his hand and said wearily: ‘We have given counsel for the defence the greatest possible latitude. He has taken up a great deal of time with irrelevancies.’ He seemed surprised and a little shocked at the ingenuity of the attempt to save the accused man. Ingenuity but not passion; the two counsel nodded and becked and exchanged compliments; once they became a little acrid over Rex v. Hindle; but afterwards in the corridor Conrad Drover saw them arm in arm going off to lunch. ‘Of course I hadn’t a chance.’ ‘You did splendidly. I could see the solicitors were impressed.’ And afterwards in Piccadilly, on the steps of the Berkeley, he had heard the thin man with a jaundiced face say: ‘A pram on top of a taxi,’ and laugh. Conrad Drover had recognized him. On the same day as his brother’s fate was decided, the Assistant Commissioner could laugh at a stupid joke. His brother was just one of many men strung up for justice. The old judge said in a kind voice: ‘Counsel for the defence has argued with great skill on the question of motive. He has tried to show that the jury were improperly directed. . . .’ A young barrister just behind Conrad said: ‘I’m off to old Symond’s Court. There’s nothing more of interest here. See you in hall.’ When the door opened Conrad could hear someone sweeping in the long passage outside. The old judge said: ‘We have come to the conclusion that no cause has been shown for setting aside the decision of the jury.’

  His brother lived in a basement flat opposite the laurels and the railings of the Polytechnic. Conrad looked down and saw beneath his feet the yellow glow of the kitchen. The tenement disappeared unlit into the sky. It was like a monument above a tomb, and a light showed that someone was awake in the tomb. He rang the bell and waited. Everything was as usual, even to the footsteps and the glimmer of light which went on behind the door, even to his following Milly in silence down the stone stairs to the kitchen. They had never had much to say to each other, but it was true, he thought, as she opened the door and led him into the glow of gas among the clean stacked plates, that this was the first time they had been completely alone. One did not need to be alone with Milly to love her more than any other woman. She was not beautiful. She was small and fair and thin, her hands were too large, and she had high prominent cheekbones in a face which was too generous to be beautiful. Some women were like audited account books, the proportion of every part was entered in double column and checked and found correct, but Milly’s accounts were of a bankrupt firm, they did not balance; but this failure to balance had an extravagant generosity.

  In the kitchen they kissed with quick formality, as if it were a courtesy to be got through before the important business. He looked at the table, at the stove. ‘You’ve had no supper.’

  She said: ‘I’m not hungry,’ and then lied, ‘I had a big tea.’ The lie was not meant to deceive. It was a warning, which he understood, that everything must be said and acted on the usual plane. She was dug in so inefficiently against emotion that she was afraid of almost anything he might do. He said: ‘I’m going to fry some bacon,’ and she did not dare to make any protest. While the bacon sizzled in the pan he began to talk very fast, so fast that soon the words were almost unintelligible. ‘We had an interesting case yesterday. Suspected arson. The man set fire to part of his shop, so we think. We were going to contest his claim, but he dropped it quite suddenly, and we’re leaving it at that. He put the fire out himself, so it never came to the police. Name of Bernay. Just one room, a lot of stuff burned, and a lot more spoilt. Now why did he drop the claim? Afraid we’d be able to prove arson? The manager doesn’t believe it. He believes he didn’t care a damn about the claim, he wanted to get rid of the stuff, perhaps it was stolen and the police were watching and he got the wind up, not our business anyway.’ He looked up suddenly with horror, watching her from the other side of the stove across the thin smoke from the spitting fat. As clearly as if she had spoken he was aware of her thoughts clinging round the words fire, police, burned. ‘No,’ he said, ‘No. You must take care of yourself. There’s still hope.’ The words were bundles of grenades flung into her parapet.

  ‘You don’t believe it.’ He watched with pain and tenderness her white hopeless face, her shoulders a little bent with the weight of five happy years. He became aware with sudden clarity how injustice did not belong only to an old tired judge, to a policeman joking in Piccadilly; it was as much a part of the body as age and inevitable disease. There was no such thing as justice in the air we breathed, for it was those who hated and envied and married for money or convenience who were happy. Death could not hurt them, it could only hurt those who loved. Intolerable the weight of those happy years, of days in the Park and nights at the pictures, of the shared bed and the shared meal and the shared misery.

  She said: ‘I shouldn’t mind if he was dying here. I could look after him. We’d be together all day and all night.’ She convinced herself of how happy she could be with him dying upstairs, her eyes shone for a moment with the false happiness of her day-dream, that he was dying in the room upstairs. His love of his brother wavered at the sight of her despair. ‘Why did he do it?’ he protested.

  ‘The policeman was going to hit me,’ she said. ‘Everyone was excited.’ She began to shake all over as if she were again in the centre of the mob near Hyde Park Corner. They straddled across Rotten Row, kicking up the dust into thin smoke, and the riders turned their gleaming groomed mounts and trotted hurriedly back while the crowd shouted and laughed at them. An unemployed man waved a banner by the Achilles statue.

  ‘I saw Kay. She was off to a party meeting. They’ll have to do something for him.’

  The crowd turned and ran as the mounted police came down the Row with drawn staves. The man by the Achilles statue struck out with his banner at two policemen who pulled him to the ground and twisted his arms behind his back. He shouted for help, but the crowd was fighting to get away from the wedge of police who were driving them towards the gates. The great green plains of the Park were dotted with shabby men running away.

  ‘They won’t do anything for him,’ Milly said, flinching again at the raised truncheon and the fear of a pain which never came. The policeman was on his knees bleeding into the turf and crying and gasping, and the crowd was suddenly very far away and the three of them were alone with the grass and a park chair and a sense of disaster. The policeman’s face was wet with tears.

  ‘You’ve got to have some supper. Look, the bacon’s ready.’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’ Conrad pulled out a chair and made her sit down. He took a warm plate from the oven and laid the bacon on it. He was almost happy, making her eat.

  ‘Can’t you do something, Conrad? You’re clever.’ The words from her were not an insult as they had been from Kay.

  ‘I’m going to look after you till he’s back. You must have a man in the house.’

  ‘There isn’t a room.’

 
; ‘I’ll make up a bed on the floor here.’

  ‘All right. But I don’t need anyone. I don’t need anything.’ But she contradicted herself a moment later. ‘Isn’t there anything I can do? Think of something I can do.’ He drew a chair to the table beside her and sat down. ‘I’ll think of something. Don’t be afraid.’ But he himself, with his head in his hands, pretending to think, was dizzy with fear. She was appealing to him. He was being asked for help, and the only help he had been trained to give was adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing. The whole office depended on him, directors driving up in their cars, nodding presently over the green baize in the board room, shareholders leaping to their feet and asking petulantly what this figure meant, why that figure was not accounted for; but the dependence of one individual left him dizzy with fear.

  ‘I’m afraid without him here,’ she said. Jim had sat for the last five years in one chair in one place in the kitchen and they had talked and laughed and had hardly noticed how their nerves and their cleverness had been quietened by his serene obtuseness. ‘Tell me what to do. He always said you had the brains.’

  Conrad stared at the spread newspapers on the kitchen table. His mind took the opportunity to shirk its task, wandering across the columns of type, picking up a headline here and a headline there: ‘Mr MacDonald to fly home to Lossiemouth’; ‘Are you Insured?’, ‘Spot the Stars’.

  ‘We ought to use influence. Everything goes by influence,’ he said, thinking of the brothers on the board, the nephew in the clerks’ room. But he was daunted the next moment by his own and Milly’s insignificance. He heard the world humming with the voices of generals and politicians, bishops and surgeons and schoolmasters, who knew what they wanted, who knew what everyone else wanted: ‘I have a cousin, an uncle, a nephew, a niece,’ the world humming and vibrating with the pulling of wires. Milly’s face was lost among the harsh confident cultured faces. It did not belong to the same world; they were insulated against pain, poverty and disaster. One could not appeal to them for justice; justice to them was another word for prison.