John Brown's Body (12 page)

Now Marise told him, “You’re different. Jack thinks so.”

“I don’t care what he thinks, what anyone thinks – except you.”

“He’s going to bring his mother to look at you.”

“His mother?” When he was with her Ralph often thought he must be dreaming because there was a kind of dreamlike logic, a private sequitur between the two of them. What she said made crazy good sense just for him. “And will you think what she tells you to?”

“Of course not. I make up my own mind. If I did what I was told to do I’d be dead by now. Jack tells me to do killing things – ‘Get into the cupboard,’ he says, ‘and shut the door and let’s see how long before you suffocate.’ He says he’ll know where he is with me when I’m dead.”

That also made sense and for Tomelty it was terribly sensible. Legally she was his for his lawful enjoyment but he could not even enjoy breathing her air for fear someone else had breathed it too. He was justified, thought Ralph, exultantly breathing it.

“You mustn’t let her see you,” said Marise urgently. “You must go away when she comes. We’ll arrange a signal, I’ll put something in the window to warn you. I’ll put Barbra. Like this.” The thing had lost more of its stuffing and when she propped it on the sill it melted into a crouch. “Don’t come in if you see Barbra. When the coast is clear I’ll take her out of the window.”

“I don’t know his mother, why should I mind her seeing me?”

“She knew John Brown.” She was constantly leaving him with nothing he could profitably or safely do. He wanted to damn John Brown to hell and make her hear and understand. This was what he ought to do and now was the time. “Do you think she wouldn’t talk? Wouldn’t she just! She’s not like me, you don’t think she’s like me, do you?”

“No-one’s like you.”

“If she saw you she’d tell everyone, she’d tell the whole street.”

“Tell them what?”

“Madame Belmondo would have forty fits. Jack would shout murder and you’d have to go.”

She didn’t want him to go. He moved towards her, moving suddenly in his joy, suddenly feeling free to touch her, and she moved too, seeming to melt down and crouch, permissive, like the broken teddy bear. He stood with his hand outstretched and she waited, her skin tensed – he could see it tensing – for him to touch her.

“You mustn’t let her see you.”

There it was again, their private sequitur, she was mortally afraid of John Brown who was not here and had never been here.

“You don’t want me to go, do you?” He touched his chest, Ralph Shilling and blazingly glad of it. “They can’t do anything to me, I’ll be here when you want me.”

“Suppose she lies in wait for you? She’s cunning, suppose she hides –”

“Suppose I’m not John Brown.”

She stamped her foot. “Oh, good
heavens
!”

Scobie used to say that there was too much truth, that really there was nothing but truth. She challenged him to produce a hundred per cent lie and he said black was white and she said yes it was and he hadn’t produced even a half-truth. When he tried to argue, she said that anything could be true but nothing in this world could ever be false. He had supposed that she was grieving: after all, the truth she faced was grievous. But now he thought if there was so much truth about, why try to escape it, the goldfish might as well try to get out of the bowl.

“Good heavens,” Marise said again, “I should worry who you are, who anyone is in this place! Can’t you take a joke? You should see your face! You look like that old cat of yours. Jack says people do get to look like the things they like, he says I look like Barbra –”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“You think I’m pretty? Am I the prettiest girl you’ve ever seen?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know what girls look like now, I don’t see any.”

“Why not?”

“He won’t take me out. He doesn’t want people looking at me.”

“I’ll take you.”

“Will you? Where?”

To the end of the earth, he thought, remembering a place from far away and long ago, a beach of sand as fine as pepper with a quiet sea punctiliously rolling in, a private place without the ever present threat of Tomelty returning, where she would have no fear.

“Somewhere we can be alone.” He went close and she did not move away. She touched his hand, following with interest a big green vein with the tip of her fingers.

“Can it be anywhere I like?”

“Anywhere.”

“Then,” she said joyfully, “I’d like to go to your house.”

“My house?”

“Where you go at week-ends, where the women are, in the country.”

“To Thorne?” He was shocked. “Oh no!”

“Why not?”

“It’s out of the question, I can’t take you there.”

“It’s where I want to go.”

“But why?”

“I like the country. We went to Epsom once, to the races, and I ran away, I wanted to go where it was quiet but Jack was so angry he put me on a string like a dog. He missed the races, you see, looking for me.”

“I’ll take you to the country, it’ll be quiet, I promise.”

She curled into a corner of the couch, turning her back and hiding her face from him. Her voice came muffled and fretful. “You promised I could go wherever I wanted.”

“It wouldn’t be suitable for you to go to Thorne, it wouldn’t be the thing. You must see that.” He looked at the arch of her back, he had no experience of children but
wasn’t she acting like a child, too young a child to follow an appeal to reason? “Thorne’s not pretty. When the tide’s out the estuary is all mud, miles of grey mud. We’ll go to the sea, to Hastings or Folkestone or Leigh.”

Suppose he treated her as a child, picked her up and slapped her hands and made her listen to him?

He couldn’t, of course, no child had a line like that from ankle to thigh. “My wife would wonder, she always does.” He could hear Bertha asking, saving her questions from one week to the next, slowly getting through them if they both lived long enough.

“And there’s Emmy, her sister, she has imagination and she tends to think the worst. She’d have plenty to say.”

What might be said or asked did not shake him as much as the notion of Emmy and Bertha and Marise all together in the same place.

“It isn’t pretty,” he said again. “At this time of year the mud dries fast, it’s very pervasive, the smell of drying mud.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said into the bowels of the couch.

“It can be unpleasant. People say it’s healthy but people often believe that unpleasant things must be good for you –”

“Jack doesn’t like me going out, anyway.”

“There are plenty of places, nice places we could go. Epping or Kew – but it’s not so quiet there, of course. We could take a boat from Hampton Court – would you like that?”

“I don’t like listening to you. You talk like everyone else.”

He was not coming up to her expectations. If only he knew what they were he could try to act the superman. Better still if he knew what they weren’t. She seemed to expect a kind of devil. He felt helpless, more so than at any other time of his life. When Scobie was dying he had desperately wanted to do something, but now he
had
to, it was a crying need – what else could he call the clamour inside him?

The teddy bear was doubled up, so was she, with her face on her knees, her cheek scarlet.

“You’ll make yourself sick.”

Through the window he saw Tomelty and a woman approaching the house. Tomelty was panning wide his feet as he walked, he had turned up the brim of his hat and crammed it over his ears. The woman struck him amicably on the chest.

Ralph watched them through the curtain and as they reached the porch he said, “I’ll take you to Thorne.”

Marise looked out of her fingers. “When?”

There was a day in each week when Bertha and Emmy went to Chelmsford shopping. He thought that if it were possible for her to see Thorne without seeing them, there would be no harm done – and perhaps some inconceivable good. He couldn’t conceive it but his cause certainly needed it.

The door opened and Tomelty came in. He still had his hat crushed over his ears and he was laughing, bringing the joke with him.

Marise uncurled herself. She looked at Ralph, sharing her fright, and he thought that if it was fright on his account it was another inconceivable thing.

“Well now, my wife’s entertaining,” said Tomelty.

“The postman left a parcel here for me,” said Ralph. “Mrs Tomelty kindly took it in.”

“That’s neighbourly. Don’t let her take
you
in, though.” Tomelty blinked, but there was nothing blurred about the look he gave Ralph.

“What have you done with your hat?” said Marise. “It does look funny.”

“I was demonstrating.” Tomelty turned to the woman who stood in the doorway. “Mamie, I want you to meet Mr Shilling, the gentleman from upstairs.”

She had clear, canine eyes and Ralph felt them go through to the back of his skull, look round, and withdraw.

“You wouldn’t think she was my mother, would you?”
Tomelty put his arm round her shoulders, Ralph saw that he was proud of her. “All women should raise a family while they’re young, then the children have something to look at.”

“Listen to him.” Mrs Tomelty looked at Marise.

“People take her for my pettit ammy. Did you ever see such a girl of fifty? She still gets whistled at, that’s some sort of record. But you’d be surprised what a long memory she’s got.”

“I shan’t surprise this gentleman,” said Mrs Tomelty.

“What are you demonstrating with your hat turned up?” Marise asked Tomelty.

“That a bowler doesn’t suit me.” He nudged his mother. “Go on, Mamie, surprise Mr Shilling.”

“She doesn’t remember the same things as he does,” declared Marise. “How can he be surprised if he’s never heard of them?”

“I can remember quite a lot myself,” said Ralph. “We should probably cover much the same ground.”

“I fancy not.” Mrs Tomelty folded her arms. “If I have some nasty things to remember it’s through no fault of mine.”

“But Mr Shilling’s not one of them?”

Marise cried, “How could he be? He’s been a sailor, he’s been to sea, he hardly ever came to England.”

Tomelty rounded on her. “What’s this?”

“He was captain of a ship and he gave it up to be near his invalid wife. He started as a cabin boy, he’s been to America and India and China and round the world a hundred times.”

“He is not John Brown!” shouted Tomelty.

“Of course he’s not.”

Ralph, looking from one to the other in his own surprise saw that they each had a different expression. Marise’s was all joy, Tomelty’s nose was white and his mother was stoking her disapproval by staring round the room.

Ralph himself was concerned about Marise’s lying for him, and charmed by the transparency of it and happy that she
had done it. Her wrong reasons didn’t matter, she had done it for the right one – that she wanted him to stay.

“I see she’s still got that thing.” Mrs Tomelty pointed to the teddy bear. “It should have gone on the fire long ago, twenty years ago. You know that, don’t you?” she said to Tomelty. “You’re in a fix, boy, and you’ll have to get yourself out.”

“I shall.” Tomelty pulled the hat off his head. “So help me God –” the hat shook in his hands as he forced it back into shape – “I don’t care if He bloody hinders me, I’ll get out of it.”

“Tea for everyone, even for Barbra.” Marise picked up the toy and swung it by one leg. “And especially for Mr Shilling.”

“Thank you, I must be going upstairs.”

“That’s right,” said Mrs Tomelty, “and don’t come down here again unless you want to play dolls.”

Ralph did not choose the moment to ask for Tuesday, with Pecry no moment was better than another.

“Tuesday off?” To serve his purpose Pecry would pretend not to understand a colloquialism.

“Not come into the office,” Ralph said patiently.

“I believe you have exhausted your leave entitlement for the year.”

“This is a special case.” Certainly it was. Ralph looked down, squirming on his feet. Pecry had put his cold finger on lesser secrets than this one which stood out all over him. But he heard himself say flatly, “I’m afraid I can’t come in on Tuesday.”

“Can’t, Shilling? What impediment can you foresee to doing the work for which you are paid? Am I to understand –” Pecry lifted Ralph’s gaze with the force of his own – “that you are refusing to work on Tuesday?”

“I’m asking to absent myself. It’s family business, something I must attend to.”

“Family business? What family?”

“I have a wife and sister-in-law.”

“You have no progeny.” Pecry sighed.

“Two women are trouble enough,” said Ralph cautiously. Habitually Pecry did not express regret or relief or impatience, habitually he did not express himself at all.

“I have a son –”

That was unwonted too, the way he stopped short, the way he looked at Ralph. Everyone knew that he had a son – by asexual reproduction, Krassner said. Anyone else might have chosen that way to begin a confidence.

“Is it all right about Tuesday?” said Ralph.

Pecry did not seem to hear, he who heard and weighed everything. He asked Ralph a question – and not one of his probes either – on an entirely different subject. He asked what sort of man Ralph thought he was. Ralph kept silent
because he had not got beyond the question whether Pecry was a man at all.

“Am I the sort to father a mental and moral shipwreck?”

“Of course not.”

“I gave him fibre, integrity, principle –” The words were pushed out, perhaps he had rehearsed them to himself, over and over, examining and assessing and cataloguing, but they came battering out now – “and I gave him shelter, a boy needs to be sheltered until he learns how not to make a fool of himself. Now –” a bead appeared, a clear bead of moisture on Pecry’s dry lip – “now he makes fools of all of us.”

No-one had been able to make a fool of Pecry, not even Krassner to whom it had been worth the sack to try.

“I can’t walk down the street in his company. People laugh at us. Shilling, he’s a –” the bead broke as Pecry’s lip curled – “a Flower Person.”

Ralph wanted to smile at the notion of a weedy young edition of Pecry in a carpet coat and daisy-chain but the old edition’s humiliation was not funny. It was disturbing: having always known where Pecry stood, Ralph preferred him to stay there, he certainly didn’t relish the prospect of his coming nearer.

“He’ll grow out of it.”

“I shall never trust him again.”

What was Ralph to make of that? It was a gratuitous piece of information, a confidence, a declaration of despair from Pecry who never confided and had never been known to despair. But Ralph supposed that no-one could stay in character all the time and confidences weren’t so much reposed in other people as thrust upon them.

“At sixteen I held a position of trust.”

Pecry talked a lot about trust, about expressing and maintaining it and Krassner had done a sketch of him as Dog Tray with a nude girl balanced on his nose.

“It’s a phase, he’ll laugh at himself in six months’ time,” said Ralph. Being allowed to see under Pecry’s skin was a
privilege he had not sought. “There’s nothing unusual about it, it’s part of growing up.”

“But what into? What is he growing up into?” Pecry seemed to be appealing, asking for a right answer, one which would be right for him. “His clothes are fit only for scarecrows, renegades, apes!”

“It’s a kind of uniform. All kids like to dress up. With me it was the Boy Scouts, I wasn’t content until I had a bushwhacker’s hat.”

“Depravity I could root out, but if I extirpate this rottenness, what remains? Not a man –” Pecry’s scalp blazed through his thin hair, “nor a woman, either.”

“There’s nothing sinister about it and it’s better than the Hitler Youth.”

“The only uniform I ever wore was the King’s and I put that on when I was ordered to.”

“For which? Hitler’s or the Kaiser’s?”

“What?”

“Which war did you wear it for?”

“Does it matter? I’m asking you, Shilling, is it possible for a properly functioning brain, however immature, to conceive that the world’s problems can be resolved by sentiment?”

“Make love, not war?”

Pecry fixed Ralph with his fish’s eye. He was trying, pressing – pressing Ralph, of all people, for an answer which he could accept. “According to your theory is it part of a child’s development to lack moral and common sense? To believe that wrong-doing should be licensed and crime go unpunished?”

“You may not like the idea and it’s definitely anti-social –” Ralph found himself wishing that Pecry, even Pecry, could see the joke, but of course it was private, wonderfully private – “but some people do get away with murder.”

“What do you know about it? Or the issues involved? Issues? They’re root and branch!”

“I could give you a case in point. You may remember it.
A man named John Brown murdered two women and it was generally known that he had. Why did he do it? was one question. When? was another. If one answer could have been found, just one, they’d have hanged him. Think of it, all the forces of criminal justice couldn’t pin anything on him. There’s a song about John Brown’s body mouldering in the grave – but his goes marching on.” Ralph rocked up on his toes.

Pecry frowned. “I’m talking about my son.”

“It’s lunch-time, come and have a drink.” Ralph startled himself, asking Pecry to drink with him.

“I never take alcohol in the middle of the day.”

Yet when Ralph turned to the door Pecry stood up. Somewhere along the line a break had been made and he needed to show it to someone. He was not entirely the man people thought he was and he was showing Ralph because caste-wise there was no-one else. Pecry came first and Ralph came next – a long way after, but in lieu of family, friend or lover Pecry turned to the order of seniority.

“This is to go no further.” He settled his Homburg levelly above both eyes. “This is in strict confidence, Shilling, it must not go beyond these walls.”

Ralph left him to follow if he chose. He expected that Pecry would not choose because habitually he didn’t drink. He hoped that he wouldn’t because if he, Ralph, accepted – was obliged to accept – Pecry’s confidences now, he would also have to accept the blame for them later.

But of course Pecry wasn’t acting habitually and in the bar across the road Ralph found him at his elbow.

“This will help me to listen,” Ralph picked up his glass, “though that –” he nodded at Pecry’s lemonade shandy – “won’t much help you to talk.”

“I talk? I came to hear you develop your theory that immorality and imbecility are part of normal mental growth.” Pecry spat out the words with passionate disgust. “I could have sent him to a school where they undertake to eradicate that kind of thing, stamp it out. I’d have given
them
carte
blanche
to discipline him physically as well as mentally.
‘Mens
sana
in
corpore
sano’
is a fact and the regime is fully comprehensive. You understand? Punishment is designed to remould not merely to chastise. But the boy has a heart condition.”

“You were afraid they’d go too far?”

“They refused to accept him.”

Ralph felt slightly sick. Pecry really wasn’t human, but was he above or beneath humanity?

“You’re too hard on him. Leave him alone, he’ll be all right.”

“By whose standards?”

“By yours. They’re the ones he’s grown up with, aren’t they? He’s your son and heredity counts for something.”

“I have nothing to reproach myself with.”

There was no feeling sorry for anyone who could say that. He was rather to be envied. Ralph himself sensed reproach wherever he looked. It seemed to him that even living and breathing was done on someone else’s neck.

“My father brought me up to cherish the thought that one day I should be like him. He set me an example and I did the same for my son. Whatever good I have done has been for him to emulate, the bad I have not done has been for him to avoid.”

So he was a blueprint. It was one thing they hadn’t suspected. From Ralph down to the woman who came in to make the office tea, Pecry gave them all cause for surmise but no-one had thought of the obvious – that he was a pattern for a Pecry.

“My father swore that if he saw any of himself in me he’d thrash it out.” Ralph took a mouthful of rum and rolled his tongue in it. “It boils down to the same thing. He couldn’t set me a good example but he could knock the bad one out of me.”

Pecry put his shandy aside with lips hard primmed. “I believe that a man’s best memorial is his son and I gave him a first-class education. I paid for private coaching, for extramural
subjects, for encyclopedias and reference books, I paid for vacations abroad, study tours, season tickets and subscriptions. I paid doctors and dentists – my son often needs the doctor. I paid for his clothes, more clothes in one year than I could have use for in ten.”

“You’ve spared no expense to make him a fitting memorial,” Ralph said warmly. “There’s nothing wrong with that, everyone wants to be remembered and we’d all like to choose how and for what. I don’t think I’d choose your way even if I had a son. I’d prefer something strictly personal, more relevant, if you know what I mean. It might not last so long or it might outlive people and pass into legend – or into the records, anyway.”

Pecry frowned, but Ralph felt they were getting on to something interesting. “Which lasts longer, fame or infamy? That’s a knotty question. Of course Shakespeare said that the evil men do lives after them and the good gets buried with their bones. Let’s hope he was wrong.”

Ralph went to the bar and brought back another rum for himself. “Would you remember a murderer more than a saint?” he asked Pecry.

“I don’t anticipate my son being either.”

“He’s more likely to be a saint, the way he’s going, the first of the Flower Saints.”

Pecry stood up. “You haven’t been any help, Shilling.”

“I’m sorry –”

Pecry turned his back and Ralph raised his glass and murmured, “Marching on!” A girl in a group raised her glass and drank with him.

When Pecry had gone Ralph went across to her. “That was a private toast.”

“Did I intrude?”

“I shouldn’t mind fifty like you intruding.”

She smiled. “Quite the man, aren’t you?”

“Let me get you another drink.”

“Better not. I’m with my friend and he wouldn’t like it.” She was passably pretty although she couldn’t hold a candle
to Marise, she was only flesh and blood, no miracle. “Some other time, shall we?”

No, no other time he thought, remembering how Marise had leaned out to him that morning from her window. She was in her nightdress, the chiffon or nylon or whatever it was kept slipping off the round bone of her shoulder, off her breast and just catching, clinging on the tip so that he could see where the pink began and that it was pink and not brown or red, it was the same colour as her lips.

He had stood there bemused by the wonderful pink triangle they made, her lips and her breasts. And as if that wasn’t enough to happen to a man on his way to work, she had leaned out and said, “Come in for a minute, it’s all right, Jack’s asleep like the dead.”

“I can’t, I have to go.”

Her face clouded, it really could lose heart as if an outside sun had been covered up.

“You’re always going somewhere, you’re never here when I want you.”

“When do you want me?”

“If I start to think about you I can’t stop. But I suppose there’ll be an end sometime,” she said sadly.

He had wanted to ask what she thought, but outside her window at eight-thirty a.m. was not the place nor time.

“I don’t believe it will be long now.” She had lifted her nightdress over her shoulder and it immediately slid off and down again to her elbow. Riveted, he watched it catch on the same pink point of the same imagined triangle. “Soon I’ll have thought of everything you can do.”

“You won’t,” he said fervently, “I promise you you won’t,” and it seemed to bring out the sun again. She laughed, putting her head back and he had marvelled – as he was continually marvelling at something about her – how the scrap of nylon or chiffon or whatever it was clung to the point which wasn’t so much a point as a bud.

“Wasn’t it funny last night – Jack introducing you to his mother?”

“Very funny.”

“You knowing her all the time and she knew you, I could see.” If she wanted to think so and it made her happy, he wouldn’t ask why at the moment. “I put her off though, didn’t I? She doesn’t know what to think now. But be careful, she’ll be watching you. She’ll catch your breath for you. When I was first married she used to spy on me. She doesn’t trust me, she thinks I’m not true to Jack. You don’t know what she’s like.”

“I’m supposed to though, aren’t I?” he had gently reminded her.

*

What did she expect to find at Thorne? He looked for it himself that week-end, he was ready to put it there, whatever it might be.

But Thorne was Emmy’s, there was scarcely a trace of Bertha, let alone himself. The way the chairs stood and the grass grew was Emmy’s. There were some stuffed ibex heads and Gurkha knives. Would Marise be satisfied with those?

“Why does Emmy keep them?” he suddenly said to Bertha.

“Keep what?”

“These severed heads.”

Bertha looked at them in surprise. “They were the Colonel’s trophies. Of course she keeps them.”

“Would you keep my trophies?”

Her surprise turned on him. “You don’t have any.”

“No severed heads.”

“You aren’t the sort of man who likes to kill things.”

“If I were, I wouldn’t make it so obvious.’

Marise had said. “You don’t want to be remembered,” and if she was talking about Ralph Shilling she was right. He had no children, no talent, no trophies, he made no marks. But was she talking about him?