It’s a Battlefield (15 page)

Another identical grey object weighed down his hand and against his own will his fingers tightened: I shall be afraid of no one ever again: the drums of his ears beat ‘discipline, Drover, discipline', ‘a pram on a taxi'. He almost shouted at the assistant, ‘But I have no licence.'

‘Of course, sir, you have to produce the licence at the time of sale. If you were a regular customer we might waive a point, but naturally you will understand, sir, that we could not take the responsibility with a stranger.' He was breaking it gently; he was under the impression that Conrad might be disappointed at not being allowed to leave the shop with a beautiful instrument capable of killing a man with reliability over a distance of not more than fifty feet. ‘No,' Conrad said with pleasure, very glad that his joke was over, ‘I have no licence.'

‘Perhaps I could interest you in a householder's air pistol. No licence required.' The man's voice was perfunctory. The pomp of carpet and morning coat and glittering mahogany was not required for the sale of an air pistol.

‘No, no, I must see about the licence, and then I'll return.'

‘You have left your flowers on the counter,' icily.

‘Thank you.'

Mr Fanshawe had already turned his back. Conrad went out scattering rose petals. A bus went by, but no one pursued it, no one with complete happiness in her face ran past him to disappear, a scrap of scarlet material. The joke had not been very funny, hardly worth telling to Milly, hardly likely to make them both forget for a while Jim in prison, Thursday's execution, and laugh. For the first time in his life he was touched by hatred of his brother. How long before one could smile or laugh? How long these cramped muscles of the mouth? How long the awareness that a moment's merriment was treacherous? The palm of his hand was still cold and weighted with gun metal.

The thought occurred to him a little later: suppose Milly has succeeded, suppose Mrs Coney has signed; suppose Jim is reprieved. The idea weighed as heavily on his mind as the revolver in his palm; the weight of eighteen years descended on him. Would even Jim want that? But it was their duty to assume that life, simply life as an abstraction, without pleasure or hope or change, was what Jim would prefer to death. If Jim died they would be marked for a long time with horror; but they would live nevertheless. There would be consolations in time; they would be able to talk naturally together; some sort of a life might be painfully constructed. But if Jim lived, they would be condemned to a kind of death themselves. The end of the eighteen years would be always in their sight, chilling any chance merriment, the flat end to every story. Jim put his mouth against the wire netting and said, ‘It would be a good job if Milly married again.'

In his attaché case Conrad carried a pair of pyjamas, a sponge-bag, slippers, and a few papers. He opened it in the kitchen and packed away the contents neatly in corners; Milly had not come home. He boiled the kettle and listened, washed his hands and listened; upstairs the broken front-door banged back and forth. He wondered what was keeping her, put the flowers in water; the shop had given him its poorest flowers and one rose had already shed its petals. Presently he went upstairs.

He opened the door of Milly's room. He did not need Jim's photograph on a table by the bed to tell him that it was her room. He knew her scent: pretty and cheap. It had blown on him down passages: across the room where the shorthand typists sat; out of shop doors in Oxford Street; next him at the cinema. But it did not occur to him that the scent was a very common one, but that Milly was very often in his thoughts. He was never safe from her intrusion, for when the free samples of ‘Nuit d'Amour' were exhausted, all the thousands of coupons in the women's pages filled up, and the scent was changed (‘Vrai Paris' seeping through his door at the office, in and out of lifts and on the moving staircase), it was still the thought and image of Milly that he noticed, for Milly's scent too had changed. She was not bold and experimental like Kay; she could not afford to be, filling up innumerable forms, receiving the casket the size of a matchbox which had been pictured across half a page of
Modern
, the tiny pot of rouge, the tiny tube of cream, scent in a bottle that might have come from a doll's house.

He glanced at the table. Even now there was a form half filled in. ‘I declare that I have not made a previous application. . . .' She had signed her name, but had not yet written her address. ‘Milly Drover,' the spidery writing fell apart between the letters, which ended in a jagged hole and a blot of ink. The writing seemed to him, after the copper-plate of the office, very individual; she had been absent-minded, paused and hurried on, ended fiercely because of her thoughts. He felt tender towards her writing, touching it with his finger, wondering how long it was since the ink had dried. ‘Milly Drover,' he read again; it pleased him that their names were the same; for a moment it seemed that she was his wife. He took out his fountain pen and added his address in rough imitation of her writing. When he looked up again he saw her image in the mirror watching him.

‘What are you doing, Conrad?'

‘He read out, “I declare that I have not made a previous application. Signed Milly Drover. Address, 16, Wallace Road.'

‘Wallace Road,' she said vaguely, and then began to laugh. ‘Conrad, what a fool you are. I'm so happy.'

‘Happy?' he asked incredulously. There was a slight flush on her cheek-bones, and her wide mouth trembled; it occurred to him that she had been drinking.

‘Yes. Everything's going to be all right. I feel it. I made her sign. She didn't want to sign, but I made her sign. I feel – I feel as if there's nothing I can't do.' She took off her hat and threw it on the bed. Conrad had never known her talk so much; he was anxious, startled, disappointed. He was like a man who had been separated from one he loved for many years and returned to find her almost unrecognizable, so drastically had time worked on her. ‘I've never tried before,' she said, ‘to make people do things. Jim was always here. I didn't know that I could, but I can.' She came and sat on the edge of the dressing-table beside him and stretched her arms and yawned.

‘You've had something to drink, haven't you?' he asked uneasily.

‘Yes, Conrad, three sherries. Just like that. One after the other.' She was laughing at him; that, he thought ruefully, was what remained of the familiar Milly. Yesterday she had taken him seriously, she had appealed to him; the mood had not lasted.

‘Where did you get the money?'

‘Mr Conder treated me.'

‘Who's Conder?' he asked sharply. ‘I've never heard of Conder.'

‘I hadn't this morning, but he's helping me. He's a journalist. He knows Kay. Don't be so gloomy. Look at yourself in the glass.'

‘I've never known you talk so much. He's a clever man to make you talk.'

She pulled his tie out of his coat. ‘He's middle-aged. Conrad, and bald and married with six children. You needn't be jealous.'

‘Jealous,' he said, ‘that's a curious word to use to me. Jealous?'

‘I didn't mean anything odd,' she said. His sharpness had sobered her; she spoke in a low voice, defensively; it was the familiar Milly who spoke in that way; even if he had closed his eyes or turned his back, he would have known how she was looking, away from him, into corners, shifting her gaze, not from guile but from fear that almost anywhere she might find an enemy. He remembered her in the cramped smoky church, on the day of her wedding, amid the smell of anthracite and the drumming from the distant drills in the High Street, answering ‘Yes' with sudden loud defiance as if even in the church she expected enemies and foresaw unhappiness.

‘I brought you some flowers,' he said. ‘I put them in water.'

‘I saw them. They're lovely.'

‘They aren't much. They gave me the wrong ones. And they're overblown. They won't last long,' and immediately he thought of Thursday.

She said with less conviction: ‘Everything's going to be all right. I feel it.'

‘You mustn't expect too much from that petition.'

‘I made her sign.'

‘At the best it means eighteen years.'

‘He'll be alive,' she said stubbornly. ‘He'll be glad to be alive.'

‘And you?'

She looked at him almost with horror. ‘Me? Of course I'll be glad. It will be heaven. I'll be seeing him.'

‘Once a month.'

‘What are you getting at? Do you want him to hang?'

Conrad walked away from the mirror, along the bed, ten feet to the end wall, and back again, touched the mirror and made it swing, throwing up the reflection of his own face and the bed behind towards the ceiling. ‘I'm not sure. I'm seeing things clearer.'

‘You needn't stay here,' Milly said, ‘if you want him to hang. You can go to hell.'

‘You're more important than he is.'

‘Who to? You?'

‘Yes. What's the good of pretending? When I say you're pretty, I mean pretty to me. When I say important, I mean to me, not to Ramsay MacDonald, not to the Queen.'

She said quickly, trying to divert him: ‘I saw the Queen just now. Going into a cinema. Why does she wear hats like that?'

He took no notice. ‘Can't we ever enjoy ourselves again because Jim's made a fool of himself?'

‘I thought you were fond of him.'

‘I am fond of him. But he's making me hate him. I've got to hate somebody for this. Something's wrong, and the constable's dead, and I can't hate the law.'

She said with despair: ‘Be reasonable. It's nobody's fault. Hating doesn't get you anywhere, any more than loving does. A bed in a hospital, that's about where both get you. You look too far ahead, and you spoil everything. I was happy enough when I came home. I'd done something. I felt sure we'd save Jim, but you talk and talk and now all I want to do is to go to bed and cry.'

He looked at her with astonishment. ‘That's odd, because I was cheerful too. Till you came in. I had a joke to tell you. I went into one of those Bond Street shops where they sell guns and pretended I wanted a revolver.'

‘Why a revolver?'

‘It was for a joke. I ordered the shopman about. Complained. Then I said I hadn't got a licence and came away. It seemed a good joke at the time.'

‘It's the flattest joke,' Milly said, ‘that I've ever heard.'

‘It does seem flat now,' he said wonderingly, and they both at the same moment began to laugh. He did not know why, but as he set the mirror swinging for the second time and saw bed and face and powder-bowls rocket out of sight, he was back in the mood of carillons ringing out the hour in Atkinson's, of flower scent above the pavement, and of the girl running past knocking his umbrella aside. His face was no longer stiff with suspicion of unspoken criticisms. She had told him that he was a fool and that his joke was flat and that he could go to hell. He cherished her words as if they had been the highest praise, lost his suspicion with the idea that perhaps she had said the worst she could of him.

‘And this,' he said, ‘this is flat enough: “I declare I have not made” . . .'

‘No,' she said, ‘that's not flat, that's funny,' with tears in her eyes. ‘Conrad, you fool. You fool, Conrad.'

The mood carried them safely over several hours. Kay had not returned at tea-time; by supper he already felt that he had lived for several years with Milly. But the dark and the turning on of the light drove them a little way apart. ‘It won't be long before it's winter,' he said. ‘Is Kay all right?'

‘She knows what's what,' Milly said. She lit the gas and drew in her chair and began to crochet; he watched her for a while. She rushed at it with a reckless disregard of her pattern; again and again she had to unpick a row. The result was a patch of striped material neither round nor oval. Conrad took out his papers and tried to work, but her nearness confused him. Her legs were crossed; their thinness, her bony knee, the tangle of her moving fingers, the red slippers trodden down at the heels which dangled from her toes, her bent head, the high cheek-bones, filled him with a sadness he did not try to explain. Painfully, loop by loop, she unpicked; recklessly she dashed at the row again, the pattern fell from her knee and its corner was singed by the heat of the flame. The cold burning light scorched him where he sat; he turned the fire lower, and her face darkened as the glow retreated. Her legs reminded him of the limbs of native children photographed by missionaries. The children stared back at him from white screens in the county school, wide-eyed, uncomprehending, with no idea of the pathos they were intended to convey. A bony knee, a slipper trodden at the heel, they were enough to rouse again his longing to hate, Jim, the director's nephew, the man joking outside the Berkeley, anyone who threatened in however indirect a manner that bony knee, that slipper trodden down.

‘What is it?' he said. ‘What are you making?'

She raised her work against the light. ‘Something's gone wrong,' she said. ‘It oughtn't to be nearly square.'

‘What is it?'

‘A béret.'

‘Doesn't the pattern help?'

‘The pattern,' she said. ‘Oh, the pattern. No one can understand the pattern.' She began to read very rapidly: ‘3 treble in the 5th chain from the hook, miss 2 chain, 1 double crochet in the next, what do you call it – asterisk – miss 2 chain, 4 treble in the next, miss 2 chain –'

‘Give it to me,' Conrad said. ‘I'll show you.'

‘You can't – you can't crochet?'