John Brown's Body (8 page)

“Like? It wasn’t much different. I tended to do certain things over and over again. Now I do other things over and over again.”

“So do I,” said Marise, “shut up here and virtually a prisoner.”

He had a changeable face, she was able to change it with whatever she said. When he smiled, as he did now, Jack wouldn’t have recognised John Brown.

“Bertha’s short and plump, Emmeline’s big but not fat. You couldn’t call her fat.”

“I couldn’t call her anything, could I, I haven’t seen her. You’re not married to her too, are you?”

“Sometimes I think so.”

“Are you a bigamist as well?”

“As well as what?”

“Where did you find them and when did you marry them?”

“We met on a boat, crossing from the Isle of Wight. There was a storm and they thought the boat would sink. I found them on deck, waiting beside the life-boats.”

“What did you think about them?”

“It was pouring with rain. I made them go down into the saloon –”

Still more she wanted to know, “What do you think about me?”

She was watching him closely for his unspeakable thoughts, but after one glare of dismay his face turned wooden.

“I think you’re very kind.”

“You’re a nice one to keep talking about kindness,” she said crossly. “I don’t call that a long story. What were you doing on the Isle of Wight.”

“I went for a day trip. I like the sea, I wanted to go to sea as a boy, in the Merchant Navy. But things turned out otherwise – and I think for the best. The last five years have been the best for me.”

“Not before? Ten, eleven, twelve, fifteen years ago, wasn’t it nice for you then?” Fifteen years ago he should have been dead.

“I’ve only known Bertha about five years. It was Bertha you wanted to hear about.”

“Five years?” So that was it, and if the woman had married him and stayed married without knowing what he was she must be even stupider than Marise had supposed. Perhaps she had found out too late, perhaps he wouldn’t let her go. What kind of private fun had he had in the last five years, the best years for him?

“So it all happened before Bertha. And this is the best you can expect now.” Marise nodded, any time was better than none, any living was better than hanging. “You can tell me if you like. And if you like I’ll promise not to tell anyone else. If,” she added scrupulously, “there’s anything you don’t want anyone else to know. I would never break my promise without your permission. You’d have to come to me and say, ‘Marise Tomelty, I release you from your vow, you may talk without fear or favour about me and anything I told you’.”

“I didn’t come here to talk about myself.”

“You came to talk to me and what I want to hear about is yourself.”

He sighed, the sigh provoked her, she hated people standing away and sighing at her. “I have been the receiver of confidences from very important people. Like my uncle. If I mentioned his name you’d get a shock.”

“I’ve nothing to confide.”

“I could surprise you.”

“You do surprise me,” he said.

“But while I’m under a vow of silence wild horses can’t drag anything out of me. I shan’t tell you what I know about my uncle.”

“I wouldn’t want you to break a promise – to me or to anyone.”

“My Uncle Fred Macey –” Marise threw at him and waited.

“I ought to be going.” He lifted the cracked cup from its pool of tea. “I’m afraid I’ve made a mess.”

“He was at Scotland Yard until he retired. Detective-Inspector Macey. He was constantly in the Sunday papers.”

Wiping his fingers with his handkerchief he seemed about to wipe the table with it as well. The tea was seeping steadily out of the cup, overwhelming a grain in the wood it rolled to the edge of the table, caramel-coloured. “Hadn’t we better mop it up?”

“It’s shaped like a camel,” said Marise.

He dropped his handkerchief into the puddle. The initials in one corner stood out white a moment longer, then ‘R.S.’ turned fawn with the rest. “The tea will take the polish off.”

“My uncle was at Scotland Yard,” Marise said again, not so much a reminder for him as a launching point for herself.

“That must have been interesting.” He was mopping and fussing with the handkerchief. “If we had a saucer it would save further leakage.”

“There isn’t a saucer.” The veins on the backs of his hands intrigued her. Why were they green? In butchers’ shops the meat was red, purple and yellow, not green. Was he different from other living or recently living creatures, did he have something stronger than blood under his skin? Was that what made him go farther than anyone else? If the green were drained out would it make him safe, ordinary and safe? “My uncle was in the Murder Squad.”

He looked up. “I hope he didn’t tell you anything unpleasant.”

She declared to Tomelty that her uncle’s name had struck
terror into him. “Uncle Macey was the scourge of the underworld” – and Tomelty’s laughter did not dismay her because she had seen this man’s look, she had seen all his capability in his face. “His face split”, she told Tomelty, “like a banana”, and Tomelty told her she was lunatic.

But she had been frightened and it was not the same, not anything like the same as when she frightened herself. With this man from upstairs she was cold and burning and quick and numb and meek and frantic all at once.

Taking her life in her hands she threw it in his face. “He told me all about you, John Brown.”

Ralph had escaped from the house, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to subdue his thoughts under the same roof. He took his thoughts into the park and walked about. It was a long time since he had felt so confused, probably he never had been so confused. He saw everything getting complicated – though delightful. From such a source of delight everything must benefit, already the thoughts he had brought with him to this municipal place were making the grass greener and the geraniums redder.

A silly illusion in anyone, and dangerous at his age: she must be only a reference, he thought, walking fast, a reference of potential joy. Though not for him, he had not the capacity in his life for her – always supposing there was capacity in her life for him.

The proviso depressed and alarmed him, and then he felt further alarmed by his alarm. He would have to be very careful, could he be careful enough?

He paced on slowly, knowing that already it was too late, it had never been soon enough to take care, taking care couldn’t modify anything.

He worried about what she thought of him. He would have worried less if he could believe that she simply found him wanting because he was quite used to people wanting what he did not have. But she had an idea, she seemed to have a wrong idea of him altogether and he would have to demolish it to offer her the truth. He wished to offer her nothing but the truth.

He had been angry when she said that someone had told her all about him, shocked that she couldn’t recognise lies, lies should fall apart when she looked at them. But her uncle had told her lies about him. Why? There had to be a grain of truth somewhere, where had this man got his grain? What lies? He did not know any Fred Macey. Or any John Brown.

Some of the geraniums in this park were a crude pink, an
inorganic colour. “John Brown?” he said aloud, hoping to drop the name into context, but all that occurred to him was that John Brown had a shipyard on Clydebank. And his soul went marching on.

He turned his steps towards the Pilot and conscience, or sense, or straitlacing subsided as he crossed the thresh-hold: sinking his principles in the smell of beer, he thought.

The steak-eaters were at their end of the bar. He glanced at them and turned away, the vision he carried would be as safe with them as a lamb with tigers. Inez, the barmaid, raised her eyebrows as he mouthed his order. The bar was as noisy as ever, but the voices would be no use to him tonight, tonight he wanted to listen to the voice in his head.

He was suddenly shattered by the thought of her. In the act of reaching in his pocket to pay for his rum everything went to pieces, himself and the bar and everyone in it flew like sparks off a wheel. He felt giddy and shut his eyes. What he was experiencing – it was not cerebral enough for thought – were some of her possibilities. He remembered them in detail which he had not yet had time to discover.

A woman asked if he was all right and took his arm. In pulling away he dropped a handful of loose change and had to get down on the floor to retrieve it. He groped among legs and cigarette-butts and tried to pick up a florin of spittle. Finally he got to his feet chastened, and sixpences the poorer.

In the lavatory he stood washing his hands. But first he washed the coins he had picked up. He was soaping half a crown and some coppers when someone came to the basin beside him. In the mirror he encountered a narrow face, hard black eyes and soft-topped ears bent under the rim of a corduroy hat. He recognised the man who had watched him the last time he was in the Pilot. Ralph tore off a paper towel and went out with his wet money in his hand.

Inez made a face when he gave her the coins. He said, “They’re quite clean now,” and she dropped them from her finger-tips into the till.

Why had he come to the Pilot? He didn’t want company and he didn’t want a drink, a drink couldn’t help him. He emptied the glass with one swallow, impatient to get away. There was only one place he wanted to be and it was unnerving how much he wanted to be there – only a little while ago he had run from it like a scalded cat. I am certainly frightened, he thought, frightened in every direction except the moral one. Morals don’t come into miracles.

If he could have gone back to her and done what he wanted to do – Was it possible for anyone to do what he wanted to do? Only, he thought, if it were the last thing, the very last thing, because afterwards would be a life-long anticlimax. He had a strong inkling, practically a memory, of the smell of her skin, it smelled like children’s sweets.

There were names for what he was experiencing, and for the condition he was in there were neurotic, technical, bathetic, biblical names. Each was applicable to a part, none could identify the whole. Once upon a time he had cherished illusions and he had lusted after individual women, but nothing of this whole kind had happened to him before.

What was he to do? More accurately, what was he to expect?

“She’s not grateful,” said a voice and he found the man in the corduroy hat beside him. “After you washing your money for her she talks about how wet you made her small change.”

He was a dapper young man, busily turned out in a pin-flecked suit and a gold chain on his tie. He had come across the bar looking for Ralph, seeking him. He had brought his drink and he tipped the glass to Ralph before he drank.

“Women enjoy a little bit of dirt,” he said cheerfully, “and there’s nothing pure about the one behind the beer-engine.”

What did he want? Not company, not Ralph’s, not to track him across a crowded bar for the pleasure of it. Why didn’t he join the steak-eaters? They had company and to spare, he would be sure of pleasure with them.

“I’m new to this district,” said the young man, “but I know a feel de joy when I see one.”

Ralph held up his empty glass intending to wave it and go to the bar and not come back. He had nothing to say to anyone, he wanted to get away and hear again what had been said, what she had said half an hour and half a lifetime ago.

“Refills,” said the young man. “What’ll yours be?”

“Excuse me, I’d rather get my own.”

“Suit yourself.”

Ralph decided that he wouldn’t buy another drink, he would just leave and walk about, no-one would talk to him if he walked about.

“I keep thinking you know me because you look like someone I used to know.” The young man smiled. “I could swear you’ve got a green Singer sports outside and tally books on the seat.”

“I haven’t got a car.”

“And you don’t remember the Tomelty kids who used to ride on the bumper when they got a chance?”

“Remember who?” The name was surprising, as an invocation of her it was utterly inapt but he was unlikely to forget it. “Tomelty?”

“Jack Tomelty, that’s me. Your new neighbour at Lilliput Lodge.”

The idea of her marriage was a confrontation which Ralph had not yet faced. He certainly wasn’t ready to face the substance of it, the husband.

“Your name’s Shilling and you’ve got the top flat. Will you have that drink with me? Rum, isn’t it?” He had been watching. Now that Ralph came to think of it, someone had been watching him all the time and it could only have been this man. Tomelty nodded towards the bar. “The poolette says rum’s your drink.”

Why was he interested in Ralph? Interested enough to ask the barmaid about him, enough to watch and follow and try to buy his company?

Ralph watched him carve his way to the bar, shouldering people aside, but lightly, so that they could not object, holding his glasses over their heads. He was smiling, people looked round and smiled at him. He was the man who had discovered her, she was his wife and he was entitled to her perfections, they carried his name. She was stamped ‘Tomelty’ all through.

Ralph had a pang of impure anguish. His feelings were getting increasingly complicated and he had no right to them, he had no right to object to Tomelty, to the physical unnecessity of the man, to resent his claims on his wife and to claim her himself – dreaming of bestowal, never of theft. No right, but would legitimate feelings have been easier to bear?

“Are you married?” said Tomelty, coming back. “Then you know what it’s like.”

Ralph gazed at him with incredulity. What kind of man was he? Didn’t he know that his marriage was made in Heaven – or did he suppose every marriage was?

“Women,” said Tomelty with satisfaction, “here’s to them,” and tossed his whisky into his throat.

He must be a fool, thought Ralph, he had to be, because there was no sufficient reason why a man like him should get her, she must have fallen into his lap, he didn’t merit her and he couldn’t have won her. Look at him, thought Ralph, looking with anger, he didn’t even know what it was that he had.

“I’m just back from Liverpool, Sefton Park,” said Tomelty, “just touched down in fact, haven’t been home yet. I’m putting it off. I like the idea of being neither here nor there, not still in Sefton, not yet in Lilliput. What’s your line?”

“Line?”

“Business. I’m in brushes, household and industrial – bristling with possibilities – don’t say it. I’m a traveller. You’re truly hobbled, aren’t you?”

Ralph didn’t care for him saying it, he didn’t care for Tomelty, he cordially despised him.

“You can tell a traveller by the way he wears his watch.” Tomelty showed his, strapped inside his wrist. “On his pulse, to keep it synchronised.”

Ralph had been ready to respect him and to find himself put in his place and having to fight out of it. He was ready to fight, was even ready to lose. But this young man was not only inadequate, he measured up to something entirely alien from her.

“Not in insurance are you? That would be a turn-up for the leevre.”

He should have been enviable, after all he did possess her, but how much was he capable of possessing? Ralph set himself to think about that, it promised to be painful thinking and the sooner he faced it the better.

Tomelty tucked his whisky glass into his breast pocket and took out his cigarettes. The flame of his lighter cast shadows like tear channels down his narrow cheeks.

“I said to her, ‘If Shilling’s in insurance, it proves something.’”

“Proves what?”

“About the job making the man or the man making the job.”

Ralph was facing the prospect of Tomelty in bed with his wife – could just about face it. There was a callowness about him, he was physically unfinished, like a fourteen-year-old boy, and the sexual demands of a fourteen-year-old wouldn’t be extensive. It was still an ugly thought but not beyond endurance.

“Why does she call me John Brown?”

“She’s out of this world is Marise, never got properly into it. You have to make allowances. If I listened to everything she said!”

Ralph realised that although he hadn’t mentioned her name Tomelty had known at once whom he was talking
about. Ralph had the feeling that Tomelty had been waiting to talk about her.

“She’s buttoned up right, make no mistake but she’s fanciful. You can say something to me, it may be stupid, it may be libel, but that’s as far as it’ll go. Say the same thing to her and she’ll blow it up in your face.”

“But why John Brown?”

“I’m telling you. It was a chance remark I happened to make – stupid if you like, and I could have said you look like Johnson or Nasser and she wouldn’t have given it another thought.” Tomelty was smiling, insisting on the funny side, that there was only a funny side. “And if I’d said to anyone else that you look like John Brown, they wouldn’t have given it another thought.”

“
You
said?”

“Happened to mention, that’s all, I happened to mention. If you happened to mention that you dislike somebody’s guts, would you have to stop and worry that your wife might go and wave a knife at them?”

Tomelty’s smile lengthened, uncovering two childish fangs at either end of his mouth. ‘That’s how it is with her. Not that she’d do violence but she lays herself open to it. By God, she does.”

“John Brown – he’s not a politician, is he?”

“Drink up and I’ll get you another.”

“Who is he?”

Tomelty paused with his glass half-way to his lips. “You don’t know?”

“I know that Queen Victoria had a gillie of that name and there’s a song about his body mouldering in the grave.”

“Don’t you remember Johnny Brown and the Whybrow women?”

Ralph shook his head.

“Then there’s no harm done. Let’s forget it.”

“I want to know, I’ve a right to.”

Tomelty shrugged. “If you see it like that. I seem to be the only one who remembers anyway. I knew him when he
had this insurance book and collected half a dollar every week from my mother. Fran and Elvie Whybrow lived in Casimir Terrace, the next street to ours. He used to visit them twice a week, once on business, once on pleasure. They were saving up to get buried – as well they might.” Tomelty threw the last of his whisky down his throat. “Fran was a singing teacher, Brown killed her and got Elvie to help him carve her very small – women would do anything for him and Elvie must have thought she was getting him all to herself. They planted Fran in flower-pots, a hundred and fifty geraniums blooming like mad.”

“Geraniums?”

“They would, wouldn’t they, on the fat of the land? Well, that left Elvie – coerced, bloody Elvie, and what did he do with her? He strangled her and split her down the middle and hung her up by the heels like a pig. Sharcootry, that’s what he thought of Elvie.”

“You don’t mean that
she
thinks – that she associates me –”

“He got away with it, that’s the point. They knew he’d done it but couldn’t get a shred of proof. No blood, no knives – no flies on him. ‘John Brown’s body was the one they couldn’t hang, but his soul goes mouldering on.’” Tomelty tapped Ralph on the chest. “You see, it could be you.”

“I don’t see.”

“Look at yourself.” Tomelty pointed to the mirrors. “You’re the dead ringer of John Brown – the living ringer, Marise says.”

“
She
says? She thinks I’m a murderer?” One or two things dropped into place, others dropped out.

“Let’s say she likes the idea.”

“That’s a lie!” It burst from Ralph, wrapping up his dislike of Tomelty. He could even have come to blows, for one of the few times in his life he wanted violence.