Gordon Williams (23 page)

Louise! He did not hear his own shout, did not know if it left his mouth. Run, run from the man behind, run. Across the sittingroom, shins brushing aside some piece of furniture,
feeling
the hatred of Riddaway coming behind him, feeling the big hands reaching out.

Louise was there, on the stairs.

She had the shotgun, holding it in both hands. Two men lay at the bottom of the stairs, one looking at him. He felt his feet scrabbling over the uneven lumps of their bodies. The gun! Louise would not move. The gun!

He had his palms on the stairs, crawling, pulling. The gun! He
had no strength. It was a dream. His muscles were dead. He forced himself up, his hands on the same step as her shoes. A dream where he spoke but no words came from his lips.

Then he was falling. Louise’s face looking down at his. Louise not moving. Louise holding the gun. Not falling, being pulled. Hands on his ankles. His fingers tearing at carpet, digging for a hold, his feet kicking against the hands. Louise not moving.

He got his fingers under the edge of the stair carpet. Hold on. Looking round. Riddaway’s face, red, wet. Carpet being dragged through his burning fingers. Feeling the iron grip on his ankles. Looking up at Louise.

Help me!

Louise did not move until she saw the big man pull George to his knees, dragging him away from the stairs. He dragged him as if George was a wild dog he had by the ears and was holding at arm’s length. The big man’s face was wet with blood, a thick smear of shiny redness that made her feel faint. George must have done that to the big man, no wonder he was kicking at George, holding him by the shoulders of his sweater, George on one knee, the other foot scrabbling for a grip on the floor, the big man bent forward, his boot making dull thudding noises as it toed into George’s legs and stomach.

“Help me!”

How could she help George! There was nothing she could do to that big man. They were like lions fighting in a dark cage, the sitting-room coffee table going over, two figures tied together in a pulverising, lurching, hurtling, kicking whirlpool of crashing furniture, guttural noises...

He punched at Riddaway, but his fists made no impression. He
kicked Riddaway’s legs, but his shoes seemed to bounce. Riddaway held him by the shoulders, not letting him close enough for another bite. He felt the heavy toecap jarring on his shin. Riddaway spun him round, trying to throw him to the floor. Louise had just looked at him. Riddaway stamped down on his feet. He knew what was happening, as though he had done this many times before, even in the dark he knew. His legs were weary, but he made them move. Riddaway’s heel cracked down on his toes. He felt the crunch, but no pain. Louise had the gun, but she hadn’t moved to help. It was all he could think of, Louise not moving, then he stopped even thinking about that. Riddaway was trying to throw him to the floor, then stomp him. Don’t go down. Hold on. He got his fingers at Riddaway’s face, jabbing and tearing at skin. Riddaway kicked at his ankle from the side, trying to boot away his feet. He half fell, but held on to Riddaway, his face, his clothes, he didn’t know what he was holding. He punched at Riddaway’s face, but there was no real impact. The great hands were forcing him down, swinging him round.

They were at the door into the hall. For a moment Riddaway’s face was in the light. He tried to slip downwards out of his sweater, twisting convulsively. Riddaway grabbed his hair.

Two fingers appeared in front of his face. He could see them clearly, index and second, jutting out, other fingers bent back to the palm. He watched the two fingers jab at Riddaway’s eyes. He felt them sink into something soft. They were his fingers. He jabbed again. He could see it clearly, pink skin against red blood.

“GAAAAHH!”

Riddaway stumbled back, clapping his hands to his eyes.

“AAAAAHHH.”

George couldn’t feel his legs. But they moved. He moved, without knowing why. He was in the hall, then in the outside porch. He knew nothing except that he was out in the snow. There it was. The bat. He had to pick it up. It came up off the ground but he couldn’t feel it in his hands. He had to go back inside. He had to kill the big man. He had to...

Riddaway’s head was forward, almost on his chest, his hands flat over his eyes, swaying, inhuman bellowing, a wounded animal to be pulped into the ground before it could kill. He hit the animal once, then twice. His arms moved slowly. The animal tried to run, but the animal was blinded, it banged into the wall. He hit the animal wherever was nearest, on its back, head, arms. It had to be destroyed. The animal tried to get up, its hands trying to catch the bat. He swung down at his hands, knocking them away. The animal couldn’t see, its eyes were half-shut. He hit the animal on the forehead.

Louise was beside him. Holding his arm. Saying something. Didn’t she realise the animal had to be destroyed, once and for all, smashed into the ground, destroyed?

Then he couldn’t swing the bat any more.

“Kill it, kill it,” he kept mumbling as the men surrounded him and pinned his arms and pulled him away. “Kill it, kill it.”

Sergeant Wills looked round the sitting-room.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Jesus Christ!”

It took half a day to get a snowplough along the narrow road from Compton Wakley to Dando and then up to Trencher’s Farm, a plough followed by a mechanical digger which scooped up snow and dropped it on the other side of the high banks and hedging.

About half-past eight on Christmas Eve George phoned the Venner farm to tell Louise, who had gone there with Karen, that he was being brought home by car from the county hospital.

“They say I’m okay,” he said. His voice sounded deeper.

“That’s good,” she said. “We could stay here with Mr. and Mrs. Venner – for tonight? I mean, do you think we should go back to... it’ll be very cold, all those windows broken...”

“I don’t suppose you really want to go back there at all, do you? I’ll come to the Venner’s. Are you – all right? You and Karen? I guess it was pretty awful...”

“Whatever you think.”

“I’ll see you at the Venner’s. ’Bye...”

“’Bye.”

He put down the phone, wishing he had said ‘I love you’.

They left the hospital by a side entrance used for delivering foodstuffs. He walked along a ramp on which were stacked bright metal bins full of waste. He walked stiffly, almost every part of him burning slowly. The young doctor and the orderly offered to help him but he walked unaided. The orderly kept saying he’d never seen so many reporters and television blokes.

George wasn’t too sure from what the doctors and nurses had said whether they regarded him as a hero or a villain. It didn’t seem too important, either way. The car left the hospital unnoticed.

His eyes fixed on the piled snow and white banks caught in the beam of the car headlights, he tried to sum it up in his own mind, but he seemed to be numbed, in a vacuum, as though he didn’t know who he was any more. He could see pictures of himself, but it was impossible to associate himself with the man who had done those things. It was as if he’d been catapulted from a seat in the movies into the movie itself. It wasn’t real. Since this morning, when they’d brought him to the hospital, things had become real again. Already he was thinking of it – all of it – not as something that had actually happened to him but as something made real only by the words of the people he’d spoken to. The policeman, an English policeman with a thick accent, sitting by the bed, asking him questions, telling him the answers to his own questions.

“We’ll be making charges. It won’t be your responsibility. You’ll be a witness. I don’t know what the charges will be, not yet awhile. Difficult case, manslaughter – or attempted murder. They’re giving the Hedden man blood transfusions now. Shot all his toes off!
Cawsey, he’s got a fractured skull for sure. Hit him proper, you did, had a real go, didn’t you?”

He didn’t understand why the policeman seemed to find this ‘having a go’ slightly amusing. Bill Knapman was dead. Cawsey, Voizey, Scutt and Riddaway were being X-rayed. They’d be taken to prison once they’d been patched up. Cawsey, Voizey, Scutt and Riddaway. He could even say their names in a local accent. He repeated them over and over again in his mind. Like a line of poetry, an old ballad maybe. Their names would become famous. Four men heading for gaol. Hedden as well.

And Henry Niles. Taken back to the insane place. Not a scratch on him, crying like a baby when they opened the attic door, crying because he didn’t like the dark. Probably never understand what had happened.

And the others. Gregory Allsopp, suffering from slight exposure. Janice Hedden, severe exposure. The policeman said they couldn’t get anything out of her. Nobody had touched her. She must have run across the field making for home and lost her way. She would be all right. She would go back to her mother and brothers. What would happen to the Heddens now, with Tom Hedden a cripple facing jail? What would happen to the Knapmans?

He didn’t even know if Cawsey, Voizey, Scutt and Riddaway had wives and children. He knew nothing about them, except that they had come to his house to kill him. The policeman more or less said they were bad characters, but policemen always did.

WHY?

Was it his fault? Would these men have come in a mob if Niles had been in the house of another villager, somebody they knew? Would they really have killed Niles?

He winced as the car took a sharp corner and he slid an inch or two along the seat. Was it his fault? A terrible event had taken place, lives lost and ruined. Why? He had come as a total stranger, into a life and place he didn’t even begin to understand. If he hadn’t come, looking for peace to write a book, would Knapman still be alive? Would Hedden be a cripple? Would Cawsey, Voizey, Scutt and Riddaway be facing gaol?

He’d come to write a book about Branksheer, a nice bit of recherché academicism, an amusing dabble into the jolly, bawdy, boisterous England of the past. These men were English – yet they would never have heard of Branksheer.

There was a darker, deeper question. One he tried not to allow shape to, something lurking in the shapeless mass of words and images that danced and seethed at the back of his mind...

It was not until they’d got Karen to sleep and until the Venners had finally gone to bed that he and Louise were alone. It was a small, farmhouse bedroom, cold despite a two-barred electric fire, its only light a naked bulb in the middle of the low ceiling.

“Well?” he said.

They stood on either side of the lumpy bed, postponing the return to homely routine that undressing would mean. Her voice was thin and apologetic. She didn’t look at him.

“I’m sorry.”

“What do you mean?”

“I behaved very badly. I didn’t do anything...”

“You
didn’t behave badly. I –”

Could she answer the question? He realised that he was frightened to ask her.

“I wasn’t any help to you. I’m sorry, I lost my head. I couldn’t
believe it was really happening, when you –”

“Don’t talk about it. I should have –”

“No. I was being a bitch. I don’t know what was getting into me.”

It began to dawn on him that she was talking about something else. He stared at her, his face puzzled. Her fingers played nervously with the comb that held her Jane Austen bun.

“It never meant anything, honestly. It was all stupid. It was just a way of getting back at you... you were always in the right, Patrick just seemed like a –”

“Patrick! Patrick! Ryman? What the hell has he got to do with –”

Then he laughed noiselessly, shaking his head in bewilderment, although he knew he was only acting, because he knew exactly what she meant.

“You mean, all that stuff last night, murderers and guns and – all that and you’re thinking about Ryman?”

“It was all I could think of,” she said, turning her face away. The comb came out of her bun. Her dark hair fell in a pony tail over her curved back. “I don’t deserve you, George, it’s true, I don’t, I don’t...” she began to sob.

“You funny woman,” he said.

He went round the bed and put his arms round her head, comforting her. It happened to both of them at the same time. The stiffness made it seem even more vital. They made love on top of the bedcover, neither noticing the cold. It was the first time in his life that he was able to make love to a woman with the light on.

He didn’t have room in his head for
thoughts.
He had won. The man who had won. The man who
knew.

It was during breakfast in the Venner kitchen that she remembered
Jeremy and Sophia. They put through a call to Sophia’s London number. There was no answer. Charlie Venner said he would drive them down to Trencher’s. When they saw that there was no sign of Jeremy’s car at the house they sat in Charlie Venner’s Land-Rover at the end of the road, not saying much, the sight of the house making them think of the night before. George told himself that he and Louise were happier together at this moment than they’d been for years.

“We could leave a note on the gatepost,” said Charlie Venner.

But after about twenty minutes Jeremy’s Vauxhall estate wagon came up the road from Dando Monachorum. They got out of the Land-Rover.

Jeremy faced them aggressively, a tweed cap low over his face.

“I say, what the Dickens has been going on?” he demanded. “We were trying to phone you all yesterday. We got stuck in a drift, had to be dug out, we had to stay the night in a simply dreadful pub.”

“The snow put our phone out of order,” Louise said.

“Bloody hell, it’s
too
bad.”

“We had a spot of bother, too, old man,” said George, holding Louise’s hand. “We –”

“Bother? Do you think we were having a bloody picnic? At least you were nice and snug in your own house.
We
had a ghastly time!”

They both began to laugh.

Only Karen kept a straight face. She was distantly polite when her three cousins got out of the estate wagon. She didn’t speak until they were heading back up the road to the Venner place.

“Mummy?”

“Yes, darling?”