It’s a Battlefield (24 page)

Mrs Simpson laughed; it was, so far as he could remember, the first time he had heard her laugh. The laugh caught in the loose strings of her throat, and the sound was like a cough. ‘You telling me,' she said. ‘Faces. I can tell a face when I see one. Sixty years I've been in service. Nurserymaid, nurse, cook, housekeeper. Why, I was even in the pantry once.' She had never been so self-revealing; the past she generally kept as securely concealed as her savings, which, he happened to know, lay flat, in india-rubber bands, at the bottom of a trunk. ‘I didn't like his face,' she said, and her lips screwed up as if at the memory of innumerable faces which during sixty years of service she had disliked: the soft unformed faces of stupid children, employers who didn't know their own minds, vulgar women who railed because their food was a little burned. How she had suffered, she seemed to say, at vulgarity, obstinacy, stupidity; certainly, she didn't want another job at her age. ‘I'm well suited here,' she strangely confessed.

‘I promise you, Mrs Simpson, that I'll take a taxi if the man – er – becomes, becomes a nuisance.'

She had to be satisfied with that; one did not expect any generous response from an employer. ‘The custard was a bit better today, Amy,' that was the kind of praise to which she was accustomed. Indeed any unreserved praise she had always met with suspicion as the prelude to some piece of cheeseparing, the demand for another dish from a joint already finished in the servants' hall.

‘Well,' she said, ‘you are old enough to take care of yourself, I suppose.' She surprised the Assistant Commissioner for the second time by fetching his coat and helping him into it; she had never done it before. She flicked at some dust on the hem with her cloth and left in its place several pieces of fluff which she had removed from under the sideboard. ‘I suppose you'll be sitting up all night now. What you want to go out to dinner for with all those papers to read, I can't think.'

‘It's an old friend.' She sniffed, following him down the stairs, and her little dark eyes were full of suspicion; she opened the front door and peered out before she let him by, kept her eyes on him as he stepped carefully over a sodden gutter, as he crossed the slippery shining rain-wet road to the opposite pavement. ‘Anyway,' she screamed after him, ‘you'll have to take a taxi home. There'll be more rain before night.'

Brown clouds blew up against all that was left of the moon; the air seemed to hold rain which had not yet begun to fall. One forced one's way as if through drenched washing hanging from a line. Nothing, the Assistant Commissioner thought, will induce me to take a taxi tonight; for they were skidding on the wet tarmac. The air was busy with the grinding of brakes, the shriek of sliding rubber, the heavy single drops of rain collecting on the leaves of plane trees and then sliding downwards to the pavements and the gravel walks. Everybody walked fast to get somewhere before the storm came, everybody but the Assistant Commissioner, whose liver felt the damp, whose head swam with the nausea of swamp and jungle and the hopeless East. Nobody played round the fountains; the water was tossed and tossed trivially between the darkened sky and the shaded pool.

Why is he following me? the Assistant Commissioner wondered apathetically; it's the same man. When he reached the pavement by the National Gallery, he looked back and saw at the far end of the Square the small black-clothed figure loitering by a lion. Between them were the electric standards and the smudged pavings and the rampart and nobody at all. He could come across and talk to me now. But the man only moved restlessly round the lion's base.

The Assistant Commissioner turned his back again and went on his way, up Charing Cross Road, down into the subway, up Tottenham Court Road, turned this way, turned that, conscious all the time of the figure very far behind. This can't go on indefinitely, he thought; he has the chance to speak to me tonight; tomorrow I shall be forced to have him detained and questioned. Then the eighteenth-century door, the sense of heavy curtains, crowded furniture, pictured walls, the expectation of someone who had died while he was abroad; and the thought of Justin spread a vacancy between chair and chair while he waited, until he felt himself a dried pea rattling in an empty pod.

That was what struck him too on seeing Caroline. It was not that she was ten years older; the years could make no impression on that haggard brightly painted face, whose beauty he could recognize more easily than other men because it had so often pitiably grimaced at him from the interior of eastern shrines; it was that she was not alive in the same way. She had lost her background; the slow and simple, the rubicund Justin was dead; her brilliance was no longer seen flashing against a rough brown tweeded curtain, it glowed, glittered, was lost in wide empty spaces of air. He wondered whether her charity, her passion to help, had been a little dulled, now that Justin was dead.

‘How are you, Caroline?' She grimaced at him with a hand to her throat: ‘The doctors say that I've got to go to the south. It's absurd, of course. Next week. . . .' So it had been true, he thought, after all. She trailed about in odd timeless garments; always she gave the impression of being dressed consciously for a monument in a manner which might not seem ridiculous when the fashions changed. ‘Don't tell the others,' she croaked at him. ‘Some of them are capable of following me.'

The Assistant Commissioner said with complete sincerity: ‘You had always the, the power to inspire – er – affection.' He was surprised when she laughed at him. ‘Affection? Don't be absurd. They get what they can out of me. I'm a bit tired of them. I want to be alone.' But she was already alone; the Assistant Commissioner, the others (poets, painters, novelists and politicians) had no more ability to populate her brain than a set of ghosts; and the only ghost she would have welcomed did not appear: Justin, ‘just up from the country', his thick platitudes threading the wit and the pretensions like the remnants of a sound old cloth in a much patched coat.

‘I wanted you to come early,' Caroline Bury said, ‘to ask you about Drover. People say he's going to be hanged. It's absurd.'

‘Did you know him?' he asked her with surprise.

‘I wish I had,' she said. ‘I know them all too late.'

‘Oh come, Caroline, you know – er – what is the phrase,' he brought it out with a touch of irony, ‘everybody.'

‘Too late,' she said. ‘I know them when they've made a name.' She never troubled to explain herself; the bareness of her sentences contrasted with the intricacy of her handwriting; she offered innumerable opportunities to her enemies. Now it would have been possible for a malicious person to assume that she was complaining at not being able to discover and advertise talent. The Assistant Commissioner was not subtle; he found it easy to follow her; he knew that she regretted that her help was always given to those who were beginning to need no help. She said: ‘You could help Drover.'

‘It's out of my hands,' he said.

‘Nonsense. Beale has asked you for a report.'

The Assistant Commissioner was startled. ‘How do you know that?'

‘His secretary told me.'

‘That young man,' he said with distaste, ‘is capable of doing, that's to say, he's – I don't like him.'

‘What are you saying in your report?'

‘Really, you know, Caroline, it's private.'

‘Don't be absurd. You know you can trust me.'

But he could not trust her; it was impossible to trust anyone with so ardent, so unscrupulous a longing to help. Her charity had always been heroic; it had led her in and out of police courts; she had declaimed from innumerable witness-boxes; she had broken confidences, disclosed secrets, libelled and perjured in her desire to help.

‘I came here to see you, Caroline, not to talk about Drover. The case is over; the appeal's been heard; you ought to talk – to talk to Beale.'

‘He's a nonentity. I don't talk to nonentities.' Even the bric-à-brac supported her boast; the signed photograph of James, a great swollen brow floating over gloved hands; the cigarette box from the great dead Liberal leader; the pictures by Margaret Surrogate upon the wall.

‘So Surrogate's gone Communist,' the Assistant Commissioner said, worming away from the subject of Drover.

‘It's fashionable. But Margaret was a genius. Those pictures –'

He made a pretence of studying them. ‘I'm afraid I don't understand pictures. Aren't they rather – artificial?'

Caroline Bury laughed with a hand on her thin throat. ‘You and she are the most natural people I've ever known.'

The Assistant Commissioner was startled at the personality. He did not like to be connected with the woman who had painted those pictures; there was something about them hysterical and unhealthy; they smelt of sex as strongly as a bush of flowering May. ‘I shall never like them.'

‘Too phallic for you? Her husband, you see, didn't satisfy her.'

The Assistant Commissioner did not know where to look; his old yellow face set obstinately; he was familiar enough with Caroline to recognize that her coarseness was calculated. She was angry with him and this was her way of baiting him. ‘Of course her dissatisfaction made her as an artist. But what happens to the wives of all the men you shut up? They take in washing, don't they? They don't paint. I suppose they all find a man somewhere.'

‘You've got a low view, Caroline, of human nature.'

‘Here I am trying to do something for Drover, and all the time I'm forgetting Drover's wife. He's got one, hasn't he? What will she do if he's reprieved? Oughtn't I to be urging you to see that he's hanged?'

‘This is all Beale's business.'

‘Don't be absurd. He's waiting for your advice.'

‘Well, if you must know, Caroline, I'll tell you. I'm simply writing that it will have no effect, whether he hangs Drover or reprieves him. Beale always imagines the country's on the edge of revolution. The truth is, nobody cares about anything but his own troubles. Everybody's too busy fighting his own little battle to think of the, the next man. Except you, Caroline.' He had never said so much to her at one time.

‘Dinner is served.'

‘Are we alone, Caroline?' he asked with astonishment.

‘Yes,' she croaked at him, ‘alone,' and trailed before him to the door in her absurd, her expensive, her timeless dress. She might have added that they were alone, so far as she knew, in not caring for their own troubles, for not fighting their own battle in ignorance of the general war.

‘Really,' the Assistant Commissioner said, sitting down opposite her. He stopped and cleared his throat; he had forgotten the bowed head and the mumbled grace; impossible to catch the words, which were neither English nor Latin. ‘Really,' he began again as the gaunt unhappy face lifted. ‘I'm, you know, honoured.'

‘You are busy and I'm tired. If you won't help me over Drover, there's no more to be said.' But the Assistant Commissioner doubted that. ‘I wanted to see you anyway before this absurd operation.'

‘Operation? You never told me there was to be an operation?'

‘You would think me quite capable of inventing it to get what I wanted.'

‘You are certainly the most – er – generous.' He found himself to his own amazement absurdly moved by the sharp cynical features opposite him. ‘The most noble.' He hummed and ha-ed for want of words; suddenly, dangerously, he wanted to offer her anything she asked of him. She had never, he believed, received anything from anyone except Justin; she had given and given, time and money and nerves. ‘You are very brave,' he concluded.

‘No,' she said, ‘I'm frightened of pain. I've never been able to stand pain. That's why I'm cross and worried and unwilling to see people. I've been trying to make a will. But there's no individual I want to leave money to, and I won't leave it to the State as it's run at present; it would help to buy a few aeroplanes or tanks.'

‘The hospitals?'

‘It's banal, but I suppose I shall have to. Now I should have liked to help Drover, but Beale would be frightened of taking a bribe, I suppose?' It was another of her fantastic tactless plans.

‘Caroline, Caroline, we aren't in South America.'

‘I've been told that before, but I'm not convinced. Do you believe in the way the country is organized? Do you believe that wages should run from thirty shillings a week to fifteen thousand a year, that a manual labourer should be paid less than a man who works with his brains? They are both indispensable, they both work the same hours, they are both dog-tired at the end of their day. Do you think I've the right to leave two hundred thousand pounds to anyone I like?'

‘No.'

‘But you support it. You support it more than any other single man. Without the police force such a state of affairs couldn't last a year.'

‘Who would take the place of Beale and – er – the others? Surrogate?'

‘He's absurd, of course, but it's not a difficult thing to run a department of state. It's not so difficult as running a farm or driving an engine. There's a lot of pretence about these things. Put one of Beale's clerks in Beale's place, and he'd do as well as Beale.'

‘It hasn't been tried. It's too dangerous.'

‘It has been tried.'

‘Russia,' the Assistant Commissioner said with distress; ‘we don't want starvation here.'

‘We've got starvation here. It's only that you and I don't share it.'

The Assistant Commissioner fell silent; automatically his fork dipped and dipped; he had no idea what he was eating. Caroline Bury said: ‘It would be maddening to die now, with the world in the state it is, if one hadn't Faith.'