It’s a Battlefield (12 page)

‘The Assistant Commissioner's got nothing to do with –'

‘He'll know the right people to talk to. If only the Labour Government was still in, I'd have had the Home Secretary to lunch. But Beale. I don't know anything about Beale.'

‘He's a temperance maniac.'

‘He's a nonentity. I'm not interested in nonentities.'

A faint smile wavered across Mr Surrogate's face and he smoothed his hair. Shoes creaked on the parquet outside. Caroline Bury said: ‘I expect this is Crabbe. Do you know Crabbe?'

‘No,' Mr Surrogate said, ‘no. His works of course.'

‘He's been very tiresome since they gave him the O.M.'

Almost immediately the room was full of people.

At lunch Crabbe sat opposite him, an old man with a white moustache and red aggrieved eyes. He had not written a book for ten years and he was universally admired. But he was firmly convinced that people were ‘getting at' him. Although he was known to be difficult, he was still invited everywhere, partly because of his reputation and the Order of Merit, partly because once, five years ago, he had talked brilliantly and maliciously all through lunch. Hostesses always believed that it might happen again at any moment.

Crabbe was silent, but Sean Cassidy, the poet, was not. He talked continuously at one end of the table about astrology. The preliminary difficulty of understanding the ideas of Zoroaster was not made easier by Cassidy's brogue. But he had his uses. He prevented the general conversation being killed by the loud, clear, faintly American accents of two critics who were discussing the ideas of a Swedish theologian.

Mr Surrogate, aware that Crabbe was watching him with an inflamed eye, began to talk about the League of Nations with the quiet young woman beside him. ‘I believed in it once,' he said and admitted a moment later, ‘it is perhaps a useful start towards the World State.'

‘Under the Hammer and Sickle?' the young woman asked. Mr Surrogate smiled approvingly and sipped his Hock. He tried to see through Crabbe to the clock behind him. In half an hour Kay would be waiting for him. The wine made him feel young and vigorous. Thank God, he thought, I am not old like Crabbe and past my time; young women still hang on my words. ‘Yes, the Hammer and Sickle,' but catching the next moment Caroline Bury's eye, he plunged into humility. I am lecherous, conceited, mean, cowardly; he would have liked to confess to his neighbour all the shabby history of his marriage, to expose himself bare of intellectual and moral pretences, and what would be left? A man, Mr Surrogate thought, revolving his wine glass, no better than a criminal waiting execution, but none the less, he thought, his spirit soaring again on its perpetual seesaw, so that his fellow-guests sank swiftly below him and were flattened out among the plates, a man, the essential I.

Crabbe cleared his throat and everybody, except Cassidy, fell abruptly silent, listening. He cleared his throat again and began to choke. ‘Gristle,' somebody said, and his neighbour patted his back. ‘Porphyry,' Cassidy said, ‘writing of the Sign of Cancer. . . .' Crabbe gulped and was suddenly better, but his neighbour continued absent-mindedly to pat him on the back. Crabbe glared malignantly; it was quite obvious that he thought he was being ‘got at'. Everybody began talking again. Mr Surrogate said: ‘Under certain circumstances, I should be ready to put up with Geneva as a stop-gap.'

‘The moon in Virgo rules the bowels and belly.'

‘His treatment of the Unitarians.'

‘If Geneva,' Mr Surrogate said, ‘broadcast brotherhood as often as it broadcasts hate –'

Crabbe leant forward across the table and cleared his throat. Everyone fell silent, listening. Crabbe regarded Mr Surrogate with venom. His old eyes swelled and contracted. ‘Geneva,' he said, ‘I've never heard Geneva –' He seemed at a loss for words, a little bewildered by this sudden incursion into contemporary life from his background of long Norfolk fields, low sea and tall empty churches. But everyone listened intently and humbly to hear what the creator of Dinah Cullen and Joseph Sentry and the mad Corbett had to say about Geneva. ‘I've heard Moscow,' Crabbe said, ‘I've heard Rome, I've heard New York, but I can't get Geneva. What's your set?' he spat out furiously at Mr Surrogate.

‘Really,' Mr Surrogate said, ‘I'm sorry. You misunderstood. I wasn't referring –'

‘Don't tell me tales about a Crystal,' Crabbe said. ‘I may be old, but I'm not daft yet. The tales people tell me about what they get with a Crystal.'

Mr Surrogate sighed with relief, going down the steps, hearing the eighteenth-century door close behind him. That was over. He had done his best. Now he could leave everything to Caroline Bury. After business pleasure, but he was a little put out to find that Kay was not waiting for him at Oxford Circus. He bought an evening paper, but there was little in it but lists of starters and in the stop-press the results of the 2.30. All down Oxford Street the shops were closed and the street was almost empty. Little groups of people up from the country passed back and forth along the north side staring into the windows at models with black cloth faces. Mr Surrogate looked at his watch and bought another paper. ‘The Paddington Murder. Flying Squad Raid near Euston. Man Detained.' Curious the interest in crime, Mr Surrogate thought, and turned to another column. ‘Drama at Red Meeting. Clash behind Locked Doors.' He read the account to the end. How these pressmen exaggerated; a little fracas, worn nerves, bad temper. He turned the page: ‘Mr MacDonald Presents Golf Trophy. The Royal and Ancient Game. A Lossiemouth Welcome.'

*

Milly laid the newspaper open on her dressing-table while she put on her hat. Mrs Coney watched her from between the hairbrushes with frigid disapproval. Had the photograph been taken after her husband's death? If so there was no hint of grief. Perhaps it was an old photograph, and Milly tried to imagine what kind of a wife she had been, but the cameo brooch daunted her. It was like a medal granted for some piece of inhuman rectitude. Her hair pulled back into a knot above a waste of brow, she was of the same stuff as the women who gladly ‘gave' their sons to war and fought in parish councils for marble memorials. The face filled Milly with despair.

Her voice was hollow with it down the telephone wire. Conrad Drover did not recognize her, laying down his pen, his eyes still following a column of figures along the sheet. ‘Who's that? Speak up, please, I can't hear you.' It was his chief clerk's voice. It had no relation to his character, it was formed defensively to rebuke office boys who stole his india-rubber, to answer the questions of the Board.

‘I only wanted to speak to Mr Drover.'

‘Speaking.'

‘Oh, Conrad, is it you?' He recognized the voice then, glanced quickly through the glass door at the bent backs of the clerks, behind him at the door of the manager's room; he was alone between the glass walls, isolated between his superiors and his subordinates. ‘Yes, Milly, what is it?' It was hard to shed his clerk's voice quickly, his tongue still tingled with figures, he knew that he sounded impatient.

‘I only wanted to tell you. When Kay came home. She said . . .'

‘Is the party doing anything?'

‘They are all signing the petition. But, Conrad, listen. Something else. Mr Surrogate's helping. He's speaking to a lady who has influence.'

‘Listen, Milly.' He bent close over the telephone and confided to it his deep mistrust. ‘Don't believe too much in what they'll do. Strangers. They are interested for a time, but if things don't go right, they lose interest. It doesn't mean anything to them. We've got to do it all ourselves.' Through the door in front of him he could hear very faintly the scratching of the clerks' pens; somebody was reading out a row of figures; when he looked round, the shadow of the manager darkened the door behind, moving up and down, droning to a dictaphone. ‘We're alone.'

‘I'm on the way to that woman now.'

‘I'll see you tonight, Milly.'

‘I was wondering – I suppose it's impossible – you couldn't come with me?'

‘If you could wait till lunch time.'

‘I daren't wait. Can't you get away an hour earlier?'

‘I wish I could.' He put his head on his hands and stared at the sheets of paper on his desk; the little black figures rose at him like swarming flies. ‘It's impossible.' He heard the sound of the receiver replaced and silence sweeping up the wire. He was alone again with men whom he disliked and mistrusted, above all mistrusted. Even the most inefficient clerk, he felt certain, was scheming for his place; his glass room was a tiny raft of security round which they all swam hoping to dislodge him, hoping to catch him asleep; his position was easier, but he had not their quality of eternal vigilance and concentrated cunning; other things clamoured for his attention, his brother in prison, Milly going up the suburban street in fear and despair. But he did not even trust Milly; she loved his brother, he supposed, as much as he did himself; any word of encouragement or affection she gave him was for his brother's sake.

But as she walked up the long suburban hill lined with little half-timbered houses with chocolate-coloured cornices: ‘Desirable Residence. Only £50 down', she was not afraid. She was brave because suddenly she was angry. It wasn't right how things were, that Conrad shouldn't be allowed an hour or two to help his brother. She tugged hard at a bell and to the small grey woman who answered the door she said furiously: ‘I want Mrs Coney.'

‘I'm Mrs Coney.'

Milly looked at her with astonishment and saw now the cameo brooch, the grey hair pulled back from the forehead, the black high-necked dress, but what the newspaper had failed to indicate was the smallness of the scale; she was no more than an imitation in miniature of the harsh and unbearable woman.

‘I'm sorry. Could I speak to you?'

‘I don't know, I'm sure, whether I've the time. Are you the Press?' The eyes, bewildered and hunted, peered over Milly's shoulder, flinched in dread of a battery of cameras, of tripods, of microphones. Milly thought: She's as weak as water. She doesn't know where to turn. She's afraid of me. I can do what I like with her. She said gently, as if it were her part to encourage and to soothe: ‘I'm Mrs Drover.'

‘Yes? Yes?' The name had conveyed absolutely nothing.

‘My husband's in prison.'

Milly could see Mrs Coney drawing up a little courage like a bucket from a deep and drying well. She began to close the door. ‘I'm sorry,' she said. ‘I've no washing – or mending. I do it all myself.'

Milly put her foot in the door. ‘You don't understand. It was my husband who killed –'

Mrs Coney backed against a carved wooden bear which held two umbrellas in its outstretched arms. ‘Oh.'

‘I wanted to talk to you,' Milly said. She followed her into the narrow hall and closed the door behind her. Mrs Coney looked up at her with sudden bright relief and said: ‘I thought it was the Press again. I couldn't stand – have they been at you, too?'

‘No. My man's still alive, you see.' Milly, five feet four inches high, towered over the woman.

Mrs Coney said nervously: ‘You'll have a cup of tea. Excuse the untidiness. I've been cleaning up.'

One side of the passage was packed with occasional tables. Two or three ferns stood on the floor and the carpet had been taken up. The air was full of floating dust. ‘Would you mind the kitchen?' Milly noticed everywhere the signs of a fussing and incompetent woman, a woman who drives the dust from one room to settle in another, who buys Danish eggs for economy and leaves the gas burning.

Milly said with sudden anger: ‘I haven't come here to say I'm sorry.'

Mrs Coney whipped round from the gas stove, kettle in hand, scattering drops over the linoleum. She said in a frightened voice: ‘It must have been all a mistake. I'm not blaming you.' She put the spluttering kettle back on the stove and began to drop tea into the pot.

‘He was only defending me.'

‘I'm sure he was.'

‘You've put in six spoonfuls.'

‘Oh, dear, it will be strong. Do you mind it strong?' She sat on the other side of the kitchen table staring at Milly with her little finger crooked away from the teacup. ‘You're older than your husband?' Milly asked.

‘Ten years,' Mrs Coney said. She said weakly: ‘I always thought he'd catch me up, that I'd be gone first. I didn't think I'd ever be left alone.'

‘It feels odd, doesn't it?' Milly said.

‘Odd? I keep on going into rooms and coming out again. I can't settle. Would you like a piece of cake, dear?'

‘It's good of you,' Milly said, ‘treating me like this,' but she knew that Mrs Coney's goodness, her white brow and cameo brooch and air of frightened rectitude, meant nothing at all. It was only her surroundings which lent her an air of positive virtue. Mrs Coney was encircled by death and crime and implacable justice; even pallor and hesitation and a commonplace kindliness gained dignity from those surroundings.

‘I was so afraid it was the Press, dear. They brought great noisy cameras and told me to speak to them. They said they were going to put me on the films,' Mrs Coney said with pale astonishment, thinking of campuses and cocktail parties and orgies in Imperial Rome.

‘What did you say?'

‘I didn't know what to say. So they told me to say something about demanding justice,' Mrs Coney added with an air of shame and fear, peering at Milly over the brim of her cup and blowing on the tea to cool it. It occurred to Milly how easily the whole affair could have been settled between them. Mrs Coney did not want vengeance, she did not want another woman's husband slaughtered because she had lost her own; they were two women of the same class who could talk things over and come to an understanding. It was gentlefolk who had broken in with the laws they had made themselves, earning the fees they had fixed themselves, hundreds of pounds going into their pockets while the trial went on. A death for a death – the law demanded this, but the law had not been made by Jim or Mrs Coney or herself, it had been made by kings and priests and lawyers and rich men. Sometimes they let you off, but the decision would not be made by Mrs Coney; again, it would be the politicians and the lawyers who knew nothing about the man they saved and cared less. Somewhere, at some time, in a newspaper or a book, Milly had read the words, ‘Judgement by your peers'. She had thought it meant judgement by your lords and had been laughed at for thinking so, ‘It means judgement by your equals', but where, she asked now of Mrs Coney, was a judge who was their equal, a man with three pounds a week, who lived as they lived? And the jury? Tradesmen and gentlemen. It wasn't fair, Milly said, with her tea and Mrs Coney and the long walk home forgotten in a sense of stifled injustice.