It's a Battlefield Read online

  ‘But how?’

  ‘Spot the Stars’, he read. ‘Are you Insured? Mr MacDonald –’ There was a photograph of the Prince of Wales opening a new hostel for the unemployed; he was surrounded by men in frock coats carrying top hats; women in fur coats pressed round the edge of the picture gazing at the golden key. An officer and his bride stepped out of St Margaret’s into the blaze of publicity under arched swords. A shabby woman with a cameo brooch seemed out of place on the same page: ‘Mrs Coney, wife of the murdered police constable.’

  ‘Have you seen this?’

  The photograph roused her for a moment from the dullness of her despair. Her happiness had always been shot through with touches of malice. Her husband contented with his job and his pay had been the Communist; not Milly, contented with nothing but his love, suspicious of the whole world outside. She had never believed that they would be left alone to enjoy each other. Her malice had been a form of defence, an appeal to other people to ‘leave us alone’. She said now, looking at the photograph, in the usual tone of exaggerated dislike: ‘She reminds me of – She looks like –’ but she had been robbed of her only weapon; the woman reminded her of nothing, staring bleakly out, an inimical stranger, into the warm clean kitchen, but of the policeman on his knees crying with pain and fear in the Park.

  ‘Go and see her,’ Conrad said. ‘If she’d sign the petition the news would be in every newspaper. Something would be done.’ The photograph seemed no longer out of place on that page of celebrities; Mrs Coney too had influence.

  ‘She’d never do it.’

  ‘Go and try tomorrow. I know it’ll be difficult to go and beg –’

  ‘It’ll be easy,’ Milly said. ‘I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking what I’d do. If Jim had been killed and that woman (Coney, indeed, she’s like a starved rat) came and asked me to help her husband.’ Conrad watched her with satisfaction; he had given her something to do and she no longer despaired; she was malicious and herself again. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘what would you do?’

  ‘I’d want to pull her hair and scratch her face,’ Milly said, ‘but I suppose really – I suppose I’d sign the petition. What’s done can’t be undone, can it?’ But the saying, spoken on innumerable occasions, over spilt milk, over broken glass, over burnt pastry, played her false. It lay like a high wall between five happy years and the present. You had to remember what was on the other side. You had to strain your mind to recall the details of uneventful evenings. They could not be repeated. ‘Think of something else we can do. Think. Think.’

  Conrad thought. But the only thought which would come was of his last meeting with his brother, in a place the size of a telephone box, where you couldn’t speak and look at the same time. A look through the glass. A word through the wire. Conrad said, with his hand spread over Mrs Coney’s features: ‘We’ve got to consider something else.’ His brother had asked him, ‘How’s Milly? Keep an eye on Milly.’ It was his duty therefore to let her see the worst. There was something he was sure Milly had not considered; to have considered it did not belong to her quietness, her generosity and her malice; it belonged to his own cleverness, the cleverness of addition and subtraction, of balancing books, of double entries. ‘We’ve got to remember that if he gets his reprieve he may be in prison for eighteen years. He’s thirty-eight now. He’d be fifty-six when he came out, and you would be forty-five.’

  She took him by surprise. ‘I’ve thought of that. Of course I’ve thought of that. But what’s the good of thinking? He’d rather be alive than dead. I’ll go and see her tomorrow.’ But the long silence after her protest showed that she had not thought of it. The idea came to her suddenly and plainly of what she might lose; she felt it like a withering of the skin, the death of her sex. When he came out of prison, she would be without passion or enjoyment. ‘You can’t divorce a man in prison,’ Conrad said. He was afraid of her anger, but she was only astonished. ‘I wouldn’t divorce him. We love each other.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I can understand that. I love him too. More than anyone. I love him more than I love you.’

  ‘You’ve no cause to love me.’ He wanted to tell her that he had the same reason as his brother had; he wanted to describe her to herself, the fair fine hair, the high cheekbones, the large mouth and the large hands and the small body; the courage of her malice and the fidelity of her despair. ‘You’ve no cause to,’ she said again. ‘We’ve laughed at you. Kay and I have. How often,’ she said with a long sigh for the happy malicious past, ‘I’ve called you an old woman. Your white face and your twitchings. And now,’ she went on, smiling unwillingly, ‘you are better than a house without a man in it. When you’ve been married five years it seems odd to be alone in a house with a girl. And of course,’ she said with generosity, ‘you’ve got the brains.’

  ‘Kay doesn’t think much of them.’

  ‘Oh, you needn’t mind what Kay thinks. There’s only one thing Kay wants in a man and that’s not brains.’

  ‘I’ll come tomorrow night,’ Conrad said. She got up from the table and came and sat on its edge close to him. ‘You ought to go home to bed now,’ she said. ‘You look tired to death. You’ve been working too hard. It was good of you to come. I feel happier a lot with that idea for tomorrow. I don’t see how she can say no.’

  ‘You oughtn’t to expect too much.’

  Milly said with an impatient flash of anger: ‘You don’t expect enough. There you are, always looking as if you’d got the sack, and you’re chief clerk and you’ve got six pounds a week. Why don’t you say to yourself every day, “I’m a success. I’m a success”? If I had you here for a month, we’d see something different.’

  ‘Yes. What? Tell me?’ He sat back with a foolish uneasy smile at the thought of her company.

  ‘I’d give you lots of porridge. I’d make you sleep a lot. Your nerves are all wrong. Hold out your hand. Look how it wobbles. You wouldn’t be much good with a gun. Oh, if I had you here a month, I’d make a man of you. You’re better already. Look at you smiling. You’re different.’

  ‘You aren’t the same. I’ve never heard you talk as much as this.’

  ‘I’ve never needed to talk before,’ she said. Exhilaration and forgetfulness wavered in her face like a paper scrap in a high wind; tossed on the currents of air it floated a moment and then was blown to earth in the gusts of misery. ‘I’ve got nothing to do but talk, talk.’

  ‘Your nerves are as bad as mine.’ He caught her hands and said: ‘Help me and I’ll help you. Talk to me as you did just now, and I’ll, I’ll –’

  ‘What can you do? There’s nothing anyone can do. That woman won’t be able to do anything. No one. They’ve got him and they’ll keep him. No one likes people to be happy. If we hadn’t been so happy, he wouldn’t be there. He wouldn’t have stabbed that man. We’d be together. I never wanted to be happy. I was always afraid.’

  ‘I’ll think of something,’ Conrad said.

  *

  She thought of his promise with gratitude but without much hope as she went up the stone stairs to the bedroom on the ground floor. The whole house, even the unknown floors above, seemed draughty with emptiness. She had been the only tenant for the last six weeks, since the old woman with a beard had gone off hurriedly in a two-seater car driven by a young man – a bedstead, two chairs and a dressing-table piled in the dicky and on the lowered hood. A day later the bailiffs had come, and heavy pieces of furniture had been lowered stair by stair, shaking her bedroom walls, flaking the plaster from the basement ceiling.

  Milly took off her dress, put on her dressing-gown and began to brush her hair. Outside, the front door creaked in the wind and the draught stirred the mat. Anybody could get in, for the lock of the door was broken, and she wondered why she had not asked Conrad to stay. Again she was astonished at the change, that she should depend on Conrad. He had never, while Jim was there, been quite real to her, he had only been a quality Jim lacked, the quality of brain, the quality of nerves.
Now he was a man in the house, a fellow drop of human life to make the vast emptiness of the house seem less complete.

  Many nights when Kay was out and Jim on night duty she had been alone for hours with lifting mats and creaking doors, but she had not cared, lying in bed with her eyes open in the dark, keeping her happiness all the time in mind because she knew it would not go on for ever. And the thermos of hot tea and the plate of sandwiches in the kitchen had been all the company she needed.

  A board squeaked above her head and the mat lifted. She thought: Kay will be home soon. What has she been doing all this while? Are they helping Jim? But she did not believe it, her mind dwelling again on the green spaces of the Park and the men running away. She turned from the mirror to the empty bed, but she did not go to it. She eyed it with sad repulsion, the white turned-down sheet, the two pillows. She hardly recognized it. It was as empty as the house, as cold as the draught under doors. He ought to be lying in it, tired out with the day’s driving, but waking when she joined him. She had always felt safe in bed beside him, feeling the shape of his bones like the roughness of a wall. Now the bed was the map of a strange continent, a blank space waiting to be explored through many years, and she thought again with a sense of stupefaction: ‘If they let him off, I shall be forty-five.’ The emptiness of the floors above pressed on her again like the emptiness of years. ‘He’d rather be alive than dead,’ she thought, but she could not feel sure. She had always known what he wanted; when they were together, when they were in different rooms, when she was at home and he was at the garage, the thoughts of his slow brain had always flashed vividly in hers. But, now, because she could not imagine his surroundings, could not tell whether he was awake or asleep, communication was barred. Although they loved each other, their minds were like two countries at war, with the telegraph wires down and the rails torn up.

  The door creaked again. Sitting on the edge of her bed, she wished Kay would come home. The thought of the empty floors above her head was becoming difficult to bear. Dust and broken sashes and the mice running behind the skirting board. She had felt happier even when the strange old woman with a beard was living up there. She, too, must have been miserable, afraid of the bailiffs, planning secretly her evasion with the bedstead, two chairs and a dressing-table, and a year ago, before Milly had felt the need to fill vacant spaces with human life, a mother and six children had lived in the two rooms at the top of the house. Now she would have welcomed the crying in the night, the noises on the stairs, the constant turbulent activity, like a pudding on the boil.

  She said aloud: ‘I can’t stand it,’ and made suddenly for the door. It was as if her own footprints in the dust on the boards would make the rooms less empty, as if she could people them with scraps and cast-offs of her unhappiness. The electric lights had been turned off on the stairs and the bulbs had been stolen. She felt her way stair by stair, while her skin stiffened with the cold. When a board creaked she was not afraid. It would have been easy for a tramp to spend the night on the unused stairs, but even if she had put her hand on a face, she would not have started. She could not have said what gave her courage; whether it was because there was nothing in death for her now to shrink from or whether the thought of murder no longer terrified her because her husband was a murderer. But the stairs were as empty as the rooms through which she walked. The moonlight through the unprotected glass made them into blue cold shabby squares like the used ice at a fishmongers’. In one room she found in the grate a ball of hair combings as large as a baby’s skull and on the floor in another room an unreceipted bill for a pair of corsets. She made her way to the top, to the two rooms where there was only a smell of stale air and a dead bat on the floor, like a bundle of brown knitting. It must have come down the chimney and never found its way out again.

  A door opened and shut below and Milly trailed her dressing-gown down the bare stairs. On the first floor landing a whiff of scent blew up to her and in the light from her bedroom she saw Kay pulling off her gloves. Milly felt shy before her younger sister. She stood at the edge of loneliness, carrying a little of the vacancy of empty rooms in her blue abashed eyes, while Kay brought in with her a world of men. After five years of marriage Milly felt inexperienced and stupidly innocent in front of Kay.

  ‘What on earth, Milly? What are you doing up there?’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep. Have you been to the meeting?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are they going to do anything?’

  ‘Everyone’s signed the petition.’ Milly came down the stairs and went into her room and sat down on her bed. ‘But, Milly,’ Kay called from her own room on the other side of the passage, ‘that’s not all. Mr Surrogate’s going to do something. He’s going to use influence. A lady he knows.’

  Milly took off her dressing-gown, turned off the light and got into bed. The light from Kay’s room shone across the passage and into her own room. ‘I went home with him,’ Kay said. ‘Such a lovely flat he’s got. His wife’s dead, and there’s a beautiful picture of her. I thought he was going to make love to me, but he didn’t. He just talked. Marriage and Birth Control. It was like a rubber shop. I’m going to meet him again tomorrow night, and then we’ll see the sparks fly.’

  The door creaked and the mat lifted and Kay talked. The wind prowled round Battersea and laid a damp mark on the window pane. ‘It was raining and he sent me all the way home in a taxi.’ Milly thought: I shall be forty-five, and in the puzzled despair of the idea for a moment fell asleep. ‘Tomorrow night,’ Kay said, brushing her hair one hundred times. Milly dreamed, with a shiver of fear and pleasure, that Jim was covering her with his body, and presently they were still and happy and deeply contented. But she woke again almost immediately to the thought of Conrad’s shaking hand. A woman might as well marry a leaf, she thought with proud malice because Jim was as firm as a wall and even his stupidity had strength. But then she remembered the Park, the prison, the judge, and was angry with his stupidity and strength. She remembered the empty rooms, the bundle of hair combings, the unpaid bill and the dead bat. What was the good of loving me if you do this to me?

  Kay said: ‘He has the loveliest pink bedroom.’ She sat with her forehead almost touching the glass, hearing, as she did every night, the pounding of the machines, the rattle of the falling boxes.

  *

  ‘Drop me here,’ the Assistant Commissioner said at the corner of Great College Street, and he stiffened in an elderly irritated way as the secretary’s hand fell on his knee. ‘You won’t forget,’ the secretary said, ‘old Beale depends on you.’ Since leaving the prison he had become increasingly intimate; it was the measure of his intimacy that he now spoke of ‘old Beale’ and not of ‘the Minister’. The Assistant Commissioner wondered, with a complete lack of self-confidence, what he would do if the young man addressed him too by name, without the prefix of his rank. He was not used to these sudden intimacies; his background was filled with nephews and subalterns who called him ‘sir’. He said as quickly as he could: ‘Of course. I don’t – er – forget things,’ and fled up the street. He had never felt so ill at ease and it took all the length of the old Westminster street, with its sparse lighting and worn respectable fronts, its atmosphere of dowagers’ drawing-rooms, to restore his nerve. Behind the tall upper windows old ladies in silks spoke softly of meeting Mr Browning in Florence to old men with white moustaches, whose interest in racing had never survived the ecstatic moment of Persimmon’s passing. Twenty feet below them stepped the neat elderly figure with the yellow face, his thoughts turned on Flossie Matthews raped on Streatham Common.

  The light in his flat showed that Mrs Simpson was waiting in for him. He had ordered a light supper at six, so that he might work uninterrupted on the Streatham and Paddington reports. The Assistant Commissioner before he entered the doorway glanced over his shoulder. The movement was pure habit; in the East it was necessary always to watch the road behind; it was a condition of survival. He opened the door of his flat and th
e pale blond face of the secretary fled from his mind; he was surrounded by the comforting accumulated rubbish of his life, the native weapons, the pipe racks, the decorated gourds, the carved tobacco jars, Mrs Simpson with her twisted bun of grey hair and her vexed fidelity. Her small lined face was the size of a head-hunter’s shrivelled skull. She began to complain before he had shut the door: ‘Half an hour late. I thought you were never comin’ in. You asked for early supper.’

  He never troubled to answer Mrs Simpson. They understood one another. She liked to talk and he liked to be silent.

  ‘Your supper’s spoilt anyway.’

  He walked past her into the dining-room and saw at once the writing on the telephone memorandum. ‘Please ring Superintendent Crosse.’

  ‘He rang up twenty minutes ago. He said he’d tried to get you at the hotel, but you’d gone. I said I didn’t know where you’d been gallivantin’.’

  ‘Central 2375.’

  ‘More than my place is worth to complain, I said. I said he’d ordered his supper early, an’ now it’ll be spoilt.’

  ‘Is that you, Crosse?’

  Mrs Simpson went out and slammed the door.

  For some time the Assistant Commissioner listened in silence to the gruff suspicious voice which told him that the murderer of Mrs Janet Crowle was known. He heard of the small, terribly discreet tobacconist who had dropped into the Yard at five-thirty ‘all of a tremble’. It was extraordinary how often a case presented a blank wall up to the last moment, and then the rush of information became almost embarrassing. The tobacconist was still being examined by Crosse when the laundry rang up, and ten minutes later a frightened landlady told her story to the Euston police.

  ‘You are going to pull him in tonight?’

  ‘Yes, she says he’ll be in all the evening. He has a service revolver.’