A temporary life, p.23
A Temporary Life, page 23
‘He’ll watch his step here, I’m sure of that, Mr Leyland,’ Wilcox says.
Leyland disappears towards the lounge.
‘Met Leyland,’ Wilcox adds, ‘the other day. He showed me round some of those buildings when Newman himself was called away.’
I see Neville myself a moment later; he’s standing at the door of the library, a cigar in his mouth, talking to Fraser whose broad, bulky back is turned towards me. He glances round, smiling, as Neville points me out; he bows his head, briefly, allowing the look to linger on my face; then, the smile broadening, he turns away.
When I glance back to Wilcox I find he’s disappeared.
I turn back to the bar.
Pettrie, a drink in his hand, is returning to the door.
‘There are quieter conditions,’ he says, ‘upstairs. If you get a chance I’ll meet you there.’
He disappears to the hall outside.
I stand at the bar. I empty another glass; I pick up another. I drain it slowly. I light a cigarette. Through a window directly opposite the bar I can see into the drive outside; other groups are still arriving: lights show up across the green. A phone is ringing somewhere in the house; from the lounge across the hall comes a second roll of drums.
Mathews materializes in the space beside me.
He’s still wearing his American combat-jacket.
‘You’re for it, aren’t you?’
‘Me?’
‘I’ve heard all about it,’ he says, ‘from Bec.’
‘What have you heard?’
‘Enough,’ he tells me.
‘Don’t count your eggs,’ I tell him, ‘before they hatch.’
‘Yours are all cracked,’ he says, ‘if half of what she says is true.’
‘I believe,’ I tell him, ‘in the true democratic processes of the British constitution, emulated and admired throughout the world.’
‘Bollocks to all that,’ he says.
I finish the glass I’ve already started, pick up another and start to empty that.
‘Haven’t you had enough of that?’ he says.
‘I’ve hardly even begun,’ I tell him.
‘Have you got a fag?’
I hold one out.
‘They try and undermine you first by attempting to rouse in you feelings of common decency,’ I tell him. ‘Failing that, they clobber you, if they can, on top of the head. Failing with that, they compromise you, if they can, entirely, by offering you positions not so easily distinguishable from the ones they hold themselves.’ I tap my head. ‘I’ve got it screwed on, you see, all right. The one thing you can refuse them is co-operation, until the whole system, with a bit of luck, collapses of its own volition. I don’t give a sod for any of them, Phil.’
Rebecca appears beside me. I kiss her cheek.
She wears a frilled white blouse; her hair’s been fastened back beneath a ribbon.
‘You’ve not got him plastered,’ she says, ‘already?’
‘I’ve scarcely spoken to him,’ Mathews says.
‘There’s Mummy and Daddy in the other room. They’re about to make the presentation, if you want to come through and see it all,’ she says.
‘What presentation?’ Mathews says.
‘It’s my birthday, darling,’ Rebecca says. She takes his arm.
Glass in hand, I turn to follow them as they move across the hall.
The crowd has thickened.
A gap opens as we reach the lounge; someone begins to clap. The orchestra starts up. There’s a brief fanfare, a roll of drums; the lights in the room go out, replaced by the glare from a single lamp.
Newman and Elizabeth are standing by the fireplace, caught by the light, smiling, looking round; the crowd in the room have begun to sing.
‘Happy Birthday, dear Beccie, Happy Birthday to you.’
Rebecca steps forward into the pool of light.
There’s a round of applause, a cheer; the music from the corner veers off into another fanfare.
Newman, smiling, raising his hand, steps forward.
‘I was just wanting to say thank you,’ he says, ‘to all you good people for coming to our celebration. It was very good of you to find the time.’
There’s a roar of laughter; a cheer; a burst of applause.
‘I know how busy you are.’
Another roar.
‘It was just an informal affair which we thought we’d ask you to participate in. Being, as we are, newcomers to the district, so to speak.’
There’s another burst of applause.
Groves is standing beside me, his pale face even paler in the glare from the single lamp, his dark eyes, if anything, even blacker.
On my other side, his broad shoulder against mine, is Fraser. Mathews, like Wilcox before him, has disappeared.
‘We’re the harbingers, if you like, of history. Certainly of progress. We don’t stay long, unfortunately, in any place; like a fairy godmother, we spread enlightenment on every side.’
‘Here, here,’ comes Wilcox’s voice from across the room.
‘We bring glad tidings of another world, less hidebound, more energetic, more enterprising than the one we’re hoping to replace.’
‘Here, here,’ comes a voice from the door behind.
‘The new town we’re building, we hope, will enhance the old; revitalize it, provide it with a new stimulus; reinforce its old traditions, by, we hope, defining new ones: draw sustenance from it in the same way in which the old town we hope will draw sustenance from the new.’
There’s a burst of applause.
‘I don’t wish to go on making speeches. It’s the first opportunity, however, that Elizabeth and myself have had of meeting all our new friends at one time, and in one particular place; we’d like you all to enjoy yourselves, to have a glimpse of what our home life is like and trust that it’s not too much unlike your own.’
There’s a burst of laughter.
‘And we’d like to take the opportunity, since this is a gathering of friends, to present to our daughter, Rebecca, a little token of our esteem on this, the occasion of her eighteenth birthday.’
He takes his hand from his jacket pocket.
There’s a fanfare from the corner.
He presents Rebecca with a satin-covered box.
There’s a burst of applause, a cheer; Rebecca, red-cheeked, has taken the box; she kisses her mother, kisses Newman, then, to calls from the crowd, she opens the lid.
She gazes inside.
She holds up what appears to be, from across the room, some sort of pendant, a wing-shaped brooch.
There’s a gasp; the spotlight shifts over to a screen at the side of the room: a vast cake, glittering in the light, is revealed to the crowd. There’s a second cheer, a roll of drums.
Rebecca, her arm held by Newman, comes into the light.
She’s presented with a knife.
The next moment there’s a flash of light; the blade is raised, a moment later it’s plunged, heavily, into Newman’s chest.
A stream of blood is ejected across his shirt, the redness glistening against the white. A table’s overturned; a cry, like a groan, has filled the room.
‘My God. There’s been an accident,’ Wilcox says, his voice calling, half-wailing, as if some dietary blunder is being announced.
At least, I endure this sensation for several seconds; when I look again Rebecca is pressing the knife into the top of the cake: she eases it down. There’s a flash of light.
She cuts the cake. There’s a burst of applause.
The lights come on.
There are several cheers.
A dance tune recommences in the corner of the room.
Food is being served from a table by the door. I take another drink from a passing tray.
‘I hear you’ve had an accident.’ Fraser smiles.
‘I’m amazed at the interest it’s aroused,’ I say.
‘We’ve so little to entertain us with round here, that an accident like that,’ he says, ‘despite its seeming triviality, inevitably stands out.’
‘Maybe this’ll stand out, too,’ I say.
I hit him on the nose; from all around me come screams and shouts.
I hit Fraser so hard with my other hand that I can hear his teeth break up inside his mouth. I hit him once again, feel more stitches come apart, and continue to the door.
There’s something like a space around me; there’s a figure I fail to recognize; then someone, with a shout, has caught my arm: there are lines of feet. There’s a rush of air. A fist comes down.
A blackness, darker than the night, descends.
We’re sitting in a car. Elizabeth, a coat wrapped round her shoulders, is sitting beside me. Her gaze, aloof, remote, is fixed on some point in the road ahead.
Only as I open my eyes a little further do I see that she’s sitting directly behind the chauffeur; her head is silhouetted against the light from the headlamps of the car.
‘Are you all right?’ she says.
I’m covered in blood. I can feel it on my hands and round my cheek.
‘Where are we?’
‘We’re going to Eddie’s place. He’s gone ahead.’
‘What time is it?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
The chauffeur stirs.
‘It’s just after twelve, Mrs Newman,’ he says.
I lie back in the seat for a while.
‘Do you want a cigarette?’ she says.
She gets one from her bag; there’s the click of her lighter.
‘What happened at the house?’ I say.
‘I should just lie there,’ she says, ‘and rest.’
‘Is Rebecca all right?’
‘Of course she’s all right. She’s gone with Eddie.’
The car gives a lurch.
‘A fox. Or a badger,’ the chauffeur says. ‘This road is full of them,’ he adds, ‘at night.’
I pour out a cloud of smoke; my head has cleared.
‘I should, by all rights, I suppose, have seen a doctor.’
‘Eddie’s calling his,’ she says.
Her voice is hard, discordant; it’s as if, seconds before, she might have been shouting. Her hair, mounted above her head earlier in the evening, has been allowed to fall down around her face.
‘Are you feeling all right?’ She glances down.
‘I feel I’ve had my arms torn out.’
‘Put your head against this,’ she says.
She lowers her arm.
My head, a moment later, is cushioned by her breast.
Seconds later, it seems, the door has opened.
There’s a light outside; a glimpse of trees, a pebbled drive: a white, nail-studded door is slowly opened.
We cross a white, monastic-looking hall. A panelled door swings back. I catch a glimpse of Rebecca’s face, then Pettrie’s; then an older, bearded face is gazing down. My eye-lid’s lifted; a hand taps at my fingers. Darkness follows. There’s the sound of birds.
‘Honestly, if you hadn’t have been brought here you might have been arrested.’
‘He would have been arrested,’ Elizabeth says. She and Rebecca are sitting on the bed. The walls of the room I’m in are painted white. A window looks out onto a leafless tree. Beside the door is a wooden cabinet; porcelain figures, dancers in crinolines and men in breeches, stand on top. Immediately above it hangs a picture: a house, long and flat, glimpsed distantly at the summit of a hill.
‘Phil,’ Rebecca says, ‘got hit as well.’
‘I asked Mr Wilcox,’ Elizabeth says, ‘to take him home.’
‘I bet he was pleased at that,’ I say.
‘He had no choice, I’m afraid,’ she says.
‘What happened to Neville while all this was going on?’ I say.
Elizabeth, her eyes shielded by dark glasses, glances at her daughter.
Rebecca gets up.
‘I’ll leave Mummy to explain all that,’ she says.
She crosses to the door.
‘I’ll have to go into college, in any case. Eddie’s taking me in. I’ll see how Daddy is when I call tonight.’
The door is closed.
The room is tall; the shadow of the tree outside falls in a strangely tremulous pattern across the wall. It agitates the figures of the dancers, and the picture of the house above their heads.
Elizabeth is dressed as she was the night before: her arms are bare: there are four faint bruises beneath her lip.
‘Neville called the police,’ she says. ‘Or said he did. Whether they arrived or not I’ve no idea.’
‘What happened to the boy?’ I say.
‘He tried to join in. He jumped on Fraser’s back.’
She leans over the side of the bed and opens her bag; she gets out a lighter and finds a cigarette.
She gets out another; she lights them both.
I get up from the bed.
‘Your finger needs resetting. Perhaps both of them. I’ve to take you in to the hospital. Eddie’s doctor called last night.’
I take the cigarette.
I climb out from the bed. My right hand, it seems, I’m unable to use.
I go over to the window.
The pebbled driveway of the night before I now see as a narrow, rutted track winding off between clumps of trees to what, in the distance, looks like a tall stone wall; there’s a pebbled courtyard immediately below, a small pond between the courtyard and the nearest clump of trees and, beyond a wooden fence, a system of hedged fields stretching away to a line of hills, their summits at the moment lost in wreaths of mist.
‘What’s happened to Neville?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Did he call last night?’
She shakes her head.
‘What happened,’ I ask her, ‘when we left the house?’
‘We had a row.’
‘With everyone there?’
‘I was standing in the drive; Neville was at a window. He came out onto the porch when they got you on the lawn. I must have gone berserk.’
She removes the glasses.
‘I put these on while Eddie was here.’
Her eyes are swollen. She gets out a handkerchief. She holds it in her hand.
‘Shouldn’t you go back home?’
‘I suppose I should.’
‘I’ll get a bus to town,’ I say.
‘You won’t from here. We’re miles from anywhere. That’s why we came.’
‘Have we got a car?’
She looks at her watch.
‘They’re sending one from town. It’ll take an hour.’
The fingers of my right hand are blue and swollen, the knuckles disjointed. The strapping on my ribs has been renewed.
I can see my face reflected in the window; my nose is swollen; cuts have re-opened above my eyes and nose.
‘Does Neville know we’re here?’
‘I suppose he must.’
‘Who got me to the car?’
‘Bennings did, I suppose,’ she says.
‘What happened to Groves?’
‘He was lying in the hall.’
‘What happened to Fraser?’
‘He was lying on the lawn.’
‘Did you see what happened?’
‘Not all of it.’ She wipes her eyes. ‘What started it off, in any case?’ she says.
‘I can’t remember.’
‘Do you imagine these provocations,’ she says, ‘or are they real?’
She waits.
‘Most of them are real.’
‘You only have one reaction to anything,’ she says.
‘It’s more honest, I suppose, than most.’
‘I’m not so sure.’
She gets up from the bed.
‘I think I’ll have a wash. I’ve been talking to Eddie half the night. There’s a woman downstairs, called Mrs Bowen. She’ll get you anything you want.’
She goes to the door.
‘When the car arrives,’ she says, ‘I’ll let you know.’
The door is closed.
The house is silent.
My clothes are folded on a chair beside the bed. The shirt and the coat are covered in blood. The trousers, when I pull them on, I find, are torn. My tie has disappeared.
There’s blood on my shoes; there’s blood, too, I notice on the bed.
I pull on my shirt; I go to the door.
Outside, a broad, white-walled corridor with a bare wooden floor runs down to a landing; from the banister rail I gaze down to the hall; there’s a wooden table, a wooden bench, long and narrow, in the centre of the floor: there’s the inside, too, of the metal-studded door. Other doors open off on either side.
Plates and cups and saucers have been set out on the table; a woman in a white overall is clearing some of them away.
She glances up.
‘Is there anything I can get you, sir?’ she says.
‘I’m looking for the bath,’ I say.
‘It’s the second door along.’
She turns back to the table.
I go back up the corridor towards the room.
The second door is already open; there’s a bath inside, a shower.
I’m standing under the shower a moment later when Neville appears inside the door.
He stands there a moment, dark-eyed, then says, ‘I’ll see you downstairs as soon as you’ve finished.’
I begin to laugh.
My arms have begun to shake.
He’s dressed in a dark blue suit; he has a clean white collar; there’s a white handkerchief showing out of the breast-pocket of his jacket.
I step out from the shower and begin to dress.
When I go down to the landing I see Groves and Leyland and Fraser waiting in the hall. There are two men I’ve never seen before standing by the door: they both wear suits, one with a flower in his button-hole, the other with a handkerchief sticking from his pocket.
I go down the stairs and fasten my shirt.
I pull on my coat as I reach the hall itself.
Neville is sitting at the table; the others stand around the room. The woman in the white overall has gone.
Neville’s hair is neatly combed; the light, which comes from windows high in the walls, shines, glistening, along the parting. His hands, small, neat-fingered, he rests before him on the table.
‘We weren’t expecting you,’ I say.
‘That’s all right.’
He points to the cups.
‘Do you fancy some coffee?’
