John Brown's Body (2 page)

Tomelty had taken nearly half a pint of whisky, but alcohol did not go to his counter-jumper’s head, he soaked up and held it without evidence and neither pressure nor twisting could wring any of it out. It firmed his rather trumpery good humour into joy, as if he had at last found reason to be joyful.

“Here’s one you’ll see, one of our neighbours. No butcher, baker or ten per-cent census taker: age forty to forty-five, presses his pants under his mattress and dreams about Ernie.”

“It’ll be Mr Shilling.” Marise sat on the couch and pulled rubber cubes out of Barbra-Bear’s side.

“Another form of life for you. What a whirl.”

“I know lots of people, I don’t have to chase after anyone.”

“We must get you something finer than these curtains. It’s like looking out of a meat safe.” He pulled the curtains back, leaving the window bare, and Marise caught a glimpse of a man who seemed to be staring into her. It went a long way in his favour, the first plunge of the eye, for a moment the three of them were fixed – Marise, Tomelty and the man outside. It was as soundless as lightning and, to Marise, as electric. Then the curtain fell back into place and of their own volition her hands began pressing back the pieces into Barbra-Bear’s side.

Tomelty said, “I’ve seen him before.”

“You’ve seen everyone before.”

“And I remember everyone, that’s the secret of my success. I tell you, I know this hom.” Tomelty came away from the window to the whisky bottle. “He polishes his boot-soles.”

“I know a lot of people to.” Marise went to the door of the flat and opened it. The man who was stepping into the entrance hall looked round. He was tall and solid and she saw at once that he would be remembered. He had a packed face with uncompromisingly functional features, a big nose with a spade-shaped end and a wide mouth with strong red lips. Only his chin looked as if it might let him down, it folded too suddenly into his hard collar.

“Excuse me, I thought you were the postman,” said Marise. He transferred his briefcase and newspaper to his left hand and lifted his bowler an inch off his forehead. “Are you Mr Shilling?”

“Yes.”

Marise nodded and closed the door. To Tomelty, standing with the cup halfway to his lips, she said, “He lives on the top floor, he’s got a cat.”

“Why did you do that, for God’s sake? Now he knows.”

“Knows what?”

“I’m trying to remember. The thing is, I may not care for him to remember me.”

Marise was slightly impressed, partly because of Tomelty who was a bouncer and had put bouncing into the technical class. Bouncing was more than his nature, it was his diploma, his college education. It had maintained her in a style to which she had soon grown accustomed. But her impression was partly, and more, to do with this place in which she now found herself. It was unagreeable insofar as it did not agree with what she regarded as her expectation of life. If these rooms were going to pull their grey woolly old air over her eyes and tell her that everything had been used up, what was there to expect, except to sit where other people had sat – in their laps almost – and put her fingers into their finger-holes and rub where they had rubbed? Except to leave a hair, except to be here long enough to be able to leave a white hair.

“Shilling you say his name is? I knew a Bob Penny. This one looks a cold fish, cold fish wear bowler hats.”

Had she been able to put her hand into Tomelty’s side and pull out the rubber stuffing, she would sometimes have pulled it all out from his feet to his head and left him as an empty skin.

“It pays to remember,” he said. “Sometimes it pays more than others.”

“What good can it do us to be in this awful place?”

“I don’t see anything awful. I see a nice high airy room with gracious furniture and gracious trees outside. This place has graciousness, Gyp. Naturally, you wouldn’t recognise that. Plummer’s was too new, graciousness is never less than fifty years old.”

“There was an old woman here who hadn’t opened the windows for fifty years. The wardrobe’s full of her hair.”

“This place will save us a pony a month in rent, that’s the good it’ll do.”

“How long shall we be poor?”

Tomelty burst out laughing. “We’re not poor, we’re careful. I’m a careful man.”

He had to be. A careless technician is still a technician, but a careless bouncer is a common enemy.

“Not with my life,” said Marise. “I can look after that.”

Tomelty had foxy white teeth when he grinned. “You don’t have a life, you have me.”

He liked to think that she was an extravagance which he could afford and other men couldn’t. She was pretty and he wanted her silly: whatever she said or did he made it to seem silly. Having a silly, pretty wife cut a bigger dash than having an expensive car, it was likely to go on longer and cost more than money. Marise knew this because she wasn’t silly.

“Full of hair?” He took the whisky bottle delicately by the neck. “Let’s see.”

Marise recalled that Ralph Shilling had the cat. She hoped it would be ginger with white feet and that it would play with her. Perhaps Ralph Shilling would give her his key so that she could make friends with the cat. It was easy to be friends with a cat because there was no personality involved, the trouble with friendships was that people made up their minds that she was this person or that and blamed her when she was herself.

“So this is where we cooshay,” said Tomelty from the bedroom. “Did you ever see such a gracious bed? It’s matriarchal, solid Empire this bed is. Did you say it had a horse-hair mattress?”

“The wardrobe smells.”

“Because it’s air-tight I expect and it’s been shut up. We’ll keep the door open for a bit, that’ll freshen it.” He poured a drink and toasted himself in the spotted mirror. “I want you to be happy.”

“How can I be when you take me away from my friends?”

“I want you to make friends.”

“I was well liked. And understood. I didn’t have to explain
myself – ‘I get up late because I don’t like to get up early’ – ‘I have no shoes on so that I can find my way in the dark’ – ‘My husband is in Manchester, this is only his coat, I am trying to think that this is not only his coat’ –”

He shouted, “I want you to make friends!” In the hush the old grey dust puffed up in shock. Tomelty dropped on to the bed. “You know I can’t help being away, Gyp, it’s my job. You’ve got to stop shutting yourself up and talking to the walls.”

“I talked to the baker, he asked me to go away with him.”

“I want you to get out of the house every day. You’re not to have things sent, go and buy them at the shops.”

Marise said with dignity, “I am hardly ever in. If you only knew, it’s difficult to get everything done in the time.”

He looked at her sombrely. “This bed’s comfortable. Come and cooshay with me.”

“I wish you wouldn’t use those words.”

“What words?”

“I know they’re vulgar. Keep them for your drinking companions.”

He rolled on the mattress, his sleeked hair split into tufts. “You’re a marvel you are –” suddenly snatching at her he pulled her to the bed. They fought bitterly, she buffeted his face with her hands. There came a twangling from the bed-springs, and hearing it she wondered why there should be music, why deep old organ music should be glorying over them. Then she was on her back on the bed, his chest on hers and his breath, very fiery, in her nostrils.

He had his eyes closed, he always did when he kissed. Raptly dreaming he looked, like a tombstone face with white eyeballs. Marise, who kept hers open, was furious with everything – especially with herself for bringing on this kind of thing. She groped around, found Barbra-Bear, and rammed its woolly snout into Tomelty’s mouth.

There was an explosion. For a slight man he made a lot of noise. Marise, tossed bodily aside, felt a correspondingly strong satisfaction.

“You bitch!”

“We have unpacking to do,” Marise said primly.

“Women have been murdered for less.” He stared at her, his hair shocked over his eyes. “I could kill you, Gipsy! I’d like to.”

“With a knife? We don’t know where the knives are – in the dresser drawer, I expect. Would you bury me under the floor? Then you could lock up and go away, no-one would think anything of that because it’s your job to go away. You could say I was staying with my mother and people would believe it. They always think they know what I’d do –”

“You think you know what
I’d
do – and what I wouldn’t do.’

“I’m next to your skin, I ought to know.”

“You’re under my skin, you’re a tick and I should tear your head off!”

Marise had to laugh. She had just seen the Barbra-Bear on its back, its grubby skirt round its neck and paws up as if someone was pointing a gun at it.

“Did you ever see such a fool?” she said. “We had a dog that used to roll on its back. My father said it was asking to be forgiven its sins. Do you think animals can be? Do you think they count as heathen? Is hell-fire stoked up with them?”

Tomelty sat on the bed, staring, but she could see that the brunt had moved off her.

“It’s like a club. You’ve got to belong to God, but not everyone can join. There should be somewhere for those who can’t, not so pearly and without music. I’d rather have dogs than angels –”

“Will you shut up?” said Tomelty. “I’ve just remembered. My God!”

“What?”

“It’s come to me from a long way back. I never forget a face.” He lay down and clasped his hands under his head. “If I gave my mind to it I could recall the doctor who delivered me.”

“What face?”

“Shilling you say he calls himself? He gave me a shock because I remembered the face but not whose face. I knew it was nothing much good.”

“I think he has a kind face.”

“When I knew that I was remembering –” he yawned – “it’s what they call a stimulus. The poor old brain got a message it hadn’t had for a dozen years and being without new instructions did what it used to do.”

“What did it used to do?”

“Prickled up, boggled a bit. I was a skinny kid at the time and though you may not believe it I was pure in heart. Mind you, I’d begun to think along my own lines, but I must have been pure because I thought I was the only one with such thoughts. This fellow with his insurance book came every week to collect half a crown from my mother. She had us paid up for burying, you see. Well, I was used to him, we all were, he was one of the family. He always came at Saturday dinner time and stayed to eat with us. It was a shock, not to say an earth-tremor, when he was taken up for murder.”

Marise sat on the bed with Barbra-Bear in her arms. “Did he murder anyone you knew?”

“He did a very fancy job, it made breakfast reading for several Sundays.”

“What happened?”

“He was acquitted. Insufficient evidence.”

“Did he do it?”

“Oh, he did it, he did it all. No doubt about that. What shook me was how he did it. I wasn’t short on imagination and I thought I was original – nasty, you know, but different.”

“What did he do?”

“Never mind.”

Marise pouted. “What’s it to do with Mr Shilling?”

“Only that he’s the dead ringer of this character, face, walk, bowler hat and all. John Brown his name was. What
a name! I can tell you, I got quite a turn just now and I couldn’t think why. Defence mechanism that was, perish the thought of John Brown. I had to dig up the memory.”

Marise poked into Barbra-Bear’s side and brought out a cube of rubber. “Here’s an early memory of hers, of when they sewed on her eyeballs. All her early memories are painful.”

“If you must keep that thing why don’t you mend it?”

“You like to think I’m a child, don’t you, so that you can shut me up while you’re away? You don’t want me to live when you’re not here. You’re the one that wants a toy.” She went to the mirror to exchange looks with herself. “Perhaps Mr Shilling
is
the murderer.” There was one particular black spot on the mirror the size of a sixpence. She stood so as to get it in the middle of her forehead.

Twice Krassner had picked up the tossing-stone which Ralph Shilling kept on his desk and twice put it down again – out of respect, one would hope, for the occasion. If so, it was the only respect he did show and was short-lived because finally he took the pebble and rolled it from hand to hand while he explained.

Reviewing the conversation afterwards Ralph realised that Krassner had not actually explained anything. Ralph had postulated and Krassner had accepted.

“I needed money, I had to have it and I took it from whence it would least be missed.”

“You borrowed it?”

“What?”

“You were going to pay it back?”

“Oh Lord yes,” he said very quickly and easily. As he would if it were true. It must be true, thought Ralph, because other considerations apart, how could he expect to survive if it wasn’t? “The Sweetland account gave me the maximum time, you know how Sweetland sometimes settles in January, sometimes in June. Well, he settled in January this year, in dirty fivers.”

“Which you didn’t pay in?”

“Oh I paid it in – into another part of the forest.”

“You knew it would be found out.”

“It was a risk I had to take.”

“Mr Pecry’s probably spoken to Sweetland already,” said Ralph, “about the new consultant fees.”

Krassner shrugged. “If the matter of the account had come up he’d have been after our blood by now.”

“
Our
blood?”

“Well, Sweetland’s on your patch and Pecry believes in the chain of command. He’d never approach me without approaching you first.”

Ralph had sometimes wondered at Krassner, more with
curiosity than envy, though he would have liked to possess some of what he called Krassner’s “aplomb”. But apparently it was not worth possessing – Ralph would have expected something-carat from it, or at least a guarantee.

“What are you going to do?”

“I?” said Ralph.

Riding smooth-shod over everything had not smoothed everything for Krassner. He was in a hole, his easy manner was not easiness, he couldn’t raise two hundred pounds of his own and Ralph was saddened as he always was by all that glittered and turned out not to be gold. “Why didn’t you ask me in the first place?”

“Would you have lent me the money?”

“I think so.”

“I had to be sure, old boy. You might have refused and then you’d know I wanted it and you’d have been on the look out.”

“What did you want it for?”

“That’s my business.”

“Women, I suppose.” Ralph could not keep a tremor from his voice.

“Is that the worst you can think of?” Krassner was a good-looking man and his face broke into laughter like a flag. “What can you think of it, anyway?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re not a flesh and the devil merchant, I’d say you catch life on television.”

Ralph said mildly, “Living isn’t only what
you
do, Krassner, there are other ways.”

“Yes, but let’s be honest –” he could still bandy the word, it was Ralph who stiffened – “your way is the straight and narrow. You’re lucky, to you doing what’s right is doing what comes naturally.”

“Is there something comic about having principles?”

“It’s not such a battle for you, old boy. You don’t know what I’m up against.”

“How can I if you don’t tell me?”

“It’s no use telling you. You’d have to be born again – a sinner.”

He took out his cigarettes – they were, Ralph observed, still in the packet – and lit one with a match. So he had sold his case and lighter. This seemed to make matters worse, it verified them and so far nothing had done that, not even the blank space on the Sweetland sheet – which simply looked innocent. Ralph had found himself having to refer back to an anomaly, almost an abstraction, certainly to a Strain on his credulity because without being the soul of honesty or the soul of anything, Krassner had made it seem inconceivable that he could cheat the firm of two hundred pounds. Two thousand perhaps. Was that the shame, that such a man should have to steal two hundred pounds?

Something landed on Ralph’s blotter and rebounded against his hand. It was the tossing-stone. He looked up and saw that Krassner had thrown it.

“Why so glum, old boy? You’re not the felon.”

He was impatient, a little annoyed. Ralph felt foolish, there was a joke somewhere which was going against himself. He put the stone into a drawer.

“Don’t call me ‘old boy’.”

Krassner said again, “What are you going to do?”

It had been on Ralph’s conscience that he would have to do something. He resented his part in the matter. He would have to have a part, in fact he already had it. It began at the moment he picked up the receipt book, or at least at the moment when the adding-machine in his brain registered that there was a gap in the sequence of stubs.

Krassner sucked at his cigarette. “The first – and last – thing you need to do is tell Pecry. That takes it right off your hands.”

“You must pay the money back. At once.”

“Certainly. Will you take a cheque?”

“You’ve got a bonus due in a couple of months. I’ll bring it forward and make it payable now.”

“On grounds of merit?”

“We must do something about that stub.” Ralph fretted around his desk searching for the receipt book.

“Why?” said Krassner. “It’s evidence. You’ll need it in Court.”

Ralph looked at him. He was smoking peaceably. “Don’t you care about being found out?”

“If I told you that being found out was the least of my worries you wouldn’t know what to say, would you, old chap?” He was bitter-pleased. At the moment this was as high as his credit went, but it was high enough for him and he was assured, perhaps, that it could never go lower.

“I’d say you were a fool.”

“Would you? Would you, by God. Well, I wasn’t born a whole man like you.”

“Me?”

“Sufficient unto yourself. In the round.” Krassner voluptuously shaped the air with his hands. “That’s you, old chap. Damn me if I wouldn’t rather be lacking and have something to go after. That’s life in my opinion.”

His opinion had never weighed much with Ralph, but life – yes, Krassner must know all about life. It was the knowledge Ralph would have wished to have, as he would once have wished to be a lion-tamer or a fireman.

“Is this what you’re looking for?” Krassner pushed the receipt-book across the desk. “Pecry will be able to tell you there’s a stub short just by looking at the thickness. Do you remember when poor old Jeffney defied security and took the overseas ledger home? Pecry bowled him out because he had spilt a drop of gravy on it.”

Ralph put the receipt-book in the desk drawer with the tossing-stone and locked it.

“Aren’t you going to take it to Pecry?”

“No.”

Krassner raised his eyebrows. “Just going to put the money back and say nothing?”

Ralph had seen the joke against himself. It was an old one. A long time ago, at school, he suffered agonies of guilt
when other boys cheated. It was so burdensome that he even thought of turning Catholic so that he could go to confession and get absolution.

“Puts me in a bit of a spot,” said Krassner. “You see, that bonus was keeping a tiger at bay.”

Ralph looked up fiercely. “Get out!”

Krassner nodded and stretched himself. His chest arched splendidly, his nylon shirt snapped hard against the square of each breast. He stood up, and he had the playtime air that he used to adopt after their monthly “progress” meetings.

“I daresay you’re wise, old boy, not to tell Pecry. He’d be bound to ask why you didn’t spot it before.”

*

That was Ralph Shilling’s day, that and the encounter with the new little creature. Seeing her suddenly, out of the brown so to speak, made him wonder if she had just been born. She was so absolutely unmarked. He could not recall such newness even in a baby. Of course a baby was not completed as she was, she was a completed woman. And little she could be without diminution. Ralph then forgot her. She provided bright though not comic relief to the day and he had other things to think about.

He liked an even tenor. He liked the way the cat greeted him when he went into the flat. He always arrived home at the same time and the cat, waiting on the other side of the door, rose to its feet with a mutter. They did not touch each other, each ventured a little way towards a common ground where for a moment they communicated as equals. Thereafter each resumed his place, the animal’s undefined, the man’s mapped and bounded with his every breath.

The cat knew what time Ralph came home just as it knew that he shut up the flat and went away on Friday nights for the week-end. The cat absented itself and then Ralph supposed it went hunting, two days and nights red in tooth and claw. He worried about it when the weather was bad but it was always there to greet him on Sunday nights.

They did not require each other, that was the crux of their association. Anything Ralph did for the animal was permitted, even his own permission for it to sit on his chairs and come in through his window, even this was permitted him. Skirting the animal now as it crouched in the middle of his floor, it was in fact Ralph who felt gratitude for the continuum.

As Ralph saw him, Krassner was not so much a criminal, was not good or bad, except in his function as a disruptive agent. There Ralph saw him as being very good indeed. Whichever way things went, Ralph would be disrupted.

Disruption had already begun. His head was buzzing with voices – Pecry’s voice saying, “I regard it as a serious reflection on your handling of the department,” and the Chairman’s voice picking up words – “Shilling states that he was unaware” – and stripping them – “Unaware?” How shameful, how naked a word! And Bertha’s voice, “But dear, that’s not bad judgment, that’s trust. You have to trust people.”

I shan’t think about it, thought Ralph, until I have eaten. I cannot be objective on an empty stomach.

He prepared his meal of a lamb chop and frozen peas. For the cat he had bought its favourite, tinned pilchards. These he cut up and set the dish on a sheet of newspaper because the cat was a messy eater. It had a bit of beard to which particles of food clung, and a habit of chewing with its head in the air, at once ruminant and wary.

Ralph thought again of the new little creature downstairs. How she had surprised everything: she set the old place quite aback, they were not used to strangers here. Old Miss Hanrahan who had died in the downstairs flat had lived there for thirty years. Ralph himself was the latest comer and he had been at Lilliput Lodge for six years. For eighteen months after he came Madame Belmondo, in the rooms below his, would scarcely say “good morning” or “good evening” when they passed in the hall. Ralph found out
afterwards that she thought he worked for the Inland Revenue.

“Off to inspect more taxes?” she said viciously one day as he raised his hat.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Of course taxes are the last thing you’d inspect, Government departments don’t put their house in order.”

When she knew that he worked for a firm of pesticide manufacturers she became friendly and even arch. Ralph was puzzled by her archness which was like the approach of men in bars offering what they called “connoisseurs’ lines”. Not that she said anything out of place, it was her beckoning and nudging looks that signified.

Ralph speared his chop and a little pink blood came through. It was not inconceivable that he would one day accept what Madame Belmondo was offering in order to find out exactly what it was.

The cat had finished its meal and looked at Ralph with an unanalysable stare, baleful and triumphant. He sometimes thought that it exulted in its power to make him provide food. It would feel powerful, coming in and dropping its flank down and getting its stomach filled without hunting, without effort. Perhaps it despised him for not providing the taste of blood. “Git!” Ralph said to it and the creature switched its tail and leaped on the window-sill.

As Ralph ate, his mind went back to the affair of Jeffney and the gravy. What a scene that had been. Jeffney had cried and actually wrung his hands and Pecry – Pecry should have paid for the performance because he enjoyed it so much. It was a rare opportunity for him to use his wit in full company. The investigation had not excluded even those who had no access and no reason for access to the ledgers, they were all present in Pecry’s office to identify the gravy stain.

Whose gravy? That was the question. “It looks like steak and kidney,” said Krassner, “with mushroom. Too dark for curry – can you rule out mulligatawny?”

Pecry sat at his desk and waited like a maestro for silence before the overture.

“I am not satisfied that everyone here has a proper conception of loyalty. Or of honesty. We must first examine what is in shortest supply – your honesty to your employers and to each other.”

Krassner always said that Pecry’s function was to louse up life but Ralph sometimes thought that Pecry was a missing link between present and far future man and was glad that he himself had already been born.

“It would seem,” Pecry had said later when the net was drawn tight, “that the working day is not long enough for you, Mr Jeffney.”

“I didn’t mind putting in some extra time, I didn’t mind at all –”

“That is, not long enough for you to do your work here in the office where you are contracted to do it.”

“This is the first time, I swear it!” Jeffney clasped his hands beseechingly and they all looked away. “I swear I have never before removed a ledger!”

“Since you had to continue to work throughout the evening I can only conclude that the work here is too much for you. Altogether too much,” said Pecry. “You could not stop for a meal, you had to go on working even while you were eating.”

“No! It was an accident, the ledger was on the table and my wife must have – as she passed – a drop of gravy –”

“You should have told me you were behind schedule. It was not your secret, Mr Jeffney, inefficiency is not anybody’s secret.” Pecry, looking round, drew them all into the net. “That’s what I mean by honesty to your employers. The principle should be paramount. Evidently it is not.”