Sea of Glass (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (18 page)

‘Very nice. But what does it mean?’

‘A bit of self-sacrifice, old boy, I’m afraid.’

There came into his eyes a warm, human look which augured well for his public relations as a future captain of finance. To me it was faintly alarming.

‘Suppose,’ he continued, ‘you were to say, “All right, clear out, if you’re set on it. But you’ll need someone to look after you. I’m coming too”?’

‘This is me saying it?’

‘I can’t think who else would,’ said Andrew with a regretful shake of his head. ‘Besides, didn’t you tell me she insisted that the police were after you as well?’

‘Damned nonsense!’

‘Still, if she does bring them down on her, I shouldn’t be surprised if they began to wonder about her associates. Bad luck of course, but it does give you a sort of special stake in the business.’

‘O.K.,’ I said. ‘We both run away. And then?’

‘You choose the day before the inquest and some place not too far from London, so that you might be on an ordinary short trip. There you commit an offence—quite a small one, but enough to get you both locked up for the night. Drunk and disorderly would do. Next morning you explain that it’s vital you should be back in London for an important inquest. Either you’re brought before the magistrate and given a brisk fine or you’re let out on bail. Either way you’re shipped back to London and Varvara has to give her evidence before the coroner. What do you think of that?’

‘I’ve heard of nothing like it since Harry Tate’s mousetrap,’ I said. ‘It seems just an elaborate way of piling one mess on top of another.’

‘That’s because you haven’t had time to take in the beauty of the scheme,’ said Andrew kindly. ‘For instance, you may say, “As soon as the girl is out of her cell, she’ll be off like a scalded cat”. But that’s not psychology. When she’s really been nabbed once, it won’t seem worth while running away. Damn it, it’ll probably give her confidence, like playing round a golf course before a competition.’

I felt that in a crazy way he was right—though not quite for the reasons he gave. After the harrowing programme which he had sketched out, it seemed unlikely that anyone would feel equal to trying to escape even from summary execution. My objections began to come down from the general to the particular.

‘You suggest we should get drunk or pretend to. Varvara wouldn’t play on that.’

‘Oh,’ said Andrew, ‘it’ll be enough if you start something. Have you ever known that girl fail to join in any row that’s going?’

Again I had to concede him at least half a point.

‘Well then . . . what about bail? They might not accept our own recognizances. You don’t suggest we should call on poor old Mrs. Ellison?’

‘We’re all in this,’ said Andrew warmly. ‘I wouldn’t mind coming down and springing the pair of you.’

How far would it be effective? How great would be the cost? These questions kept me awake for most of the night.

About the first, closer thought only strengthened my conviction that Andrew was right. It seemed to be an instance in human affairs when the homœopathic principle of countering one evil with another might pay off. Nothing except shock-treatment would cure Varvara of her stubborn folly.

I accepted these conclusions reluctantly. I foresaw their corollary all too clearly. They required that somebody should not only make an objectionable ass of himself, but also run the risk of being pilloried as a corrupter of innocent girls. Drunk and disorderly, said Andrew light-heartedly. But what if the Press got hold of the case? It would be a trivial one but they had a
penchant
for taking the mike out of college boys. If the authorities at Cambridge learnt that I had been up before the Courts it would do me no good.

Unfortunately, however, I could not pretend that it would be harmful enough to let me cancel the plan with a clear conscience. The damage bulked very small beside an indictment for murder.

My taste for disinterested action was probably rather smaller then than it is now. I suppose I must have been over the borderline of love. But it was not a clear-cut dominant passion and by itself I doubt if it would have swayed me to risk my reputation. More potent than affection for Varvara was an absurd, esoteric sense of loyalty to her dead father. With all his opportunism and amorality Fulk had obviously been a man who would stand by his friends and, if necessary, die with them.

Next day got off to a bad start. Turpin came in at breakfast and announced that there had been yet another call from the police. It was only to say that the inquest had now been definitely fixed for three o’clock on the morrow. For Varvara it was a reminder of her obsession. For me it meant that if I intended to act I must do so immediately.

I cornered her afterwards, when we were alone.

‘I hope you’ve given up the idea of leaving everybody in the lurch.’

‘If I am caught, I shall poison myself before they can torture me. But I shall leave a letter between my breasts swearing by God that you are innocent.’

It was as impossible to ignore her repeated threats as those of a deranged person. Yet Varvara was averagely sane. In her, false premises gave the same effect as advanced paranoia. How I cursed myself for the laziness and complacency which had blinded me until too late to the fact that a few weeks in Britain had hardly touched her ignorance of Western thought and customs. It all seemed ludicrous until one made the imaginative effort of reversing the positions. If I had been dumped unprepared in Doljuk, should I have made an appreciably better estimate of the dangers and impunities?

I took the crucial step.

‘Very well, Varvara. I believe you’re wrong. But I believe even more strongly that it would be a mistake for us two to take different lines. If you go, I go too.’

‘Christ reward you, my dear friend!’ said Varvara, making me feel a monster of duplicity. ‘Let us start quickly. Where shall we go?’

The order of her last two remarks was significant. But her failure to descend to details suited me. It would have been awkward if she had possessed a business-like mind which fixed on the destination as firmly as the resolve to travel.

I had given some consideration to the choice of altars for my self-sacrifice. As Andrew had pointed out, we needed a place from which, when the
débâcle
was complete, it would be possible to return quickly to London. To this I added the requirement that it should be somewhere where a bit of minor roistering would not be uncommon or exciting enough to induce the local paper to dwell on it. I wanted to get away with a small paragraph at the bottom of a page. This ruled out a number of little towns in Sussex and Hampshire and Surrey. Besides it was essential to the plan that we should be able, if necessary, to point to some reason for being in the locality.

In the upshot I had not been able to think of anywhere more suitable than my old home. Before their death my parents lived at Horrage between Dartford and Gravesend, where my father was a doctor. It was the kind of indeterminate area which we needed. During my childhood it had been a small independent Kentish town. But since then, its two great neighbours had been stretching their tentacles over it and merging it with them in a single urban block. Like most riverside districts it contained a pretty tough element and it had learnt to take the smaller delinquencies in its stride.

‘Where shall we go?’ repeated Varvara with a trace of impatience.

‘What about the Thames Marshes?’ I said, trying to make my tone conjure up an illimitable maze of sedge and water.

‘Is it wild?’ said Varvara.

‘Oh, pretty wild, if that’s what you’re looking for.’

I inwardly excused myself with the plea that there were indeed some stretches of half-flooded meadow and mud-banks just outside the town.

‘Perhaps we shall find a hut to live in,’ said Varvara more happily.

‘Yes. There are quite a lot of huts too. Boarding-huts.’ Seeing a look of disappointment and suspicion growing on her face, I hastily added: ‘You know, in a small country, when you’re running away from the police it’s often better to choose somewhere crowded. Here it’s easier to lose yourself against the people than the scenery.’

Varvara meditated this for some seconds.

‘The English have a nobler character,’ she said at length. ‘In Doljuk when a wrongdoer hid in the bazaar his fellows would wait till he was asleep and then they would stab him and bring out his body for the reward.’

‘What happened if there was no reward?’

‘Then the man went on living,’ said Varvara, surprised by so obvious a question.

Despite Varvara’s impatience, I refused to budge until after lunch, partly because I had no desire to loiter for hours round Horrage until the licensing laws allowed us to set about the task of disgracing ourselves; and partly because the preparations which I thought necessary were not yet complete.

Humanity demanded that some safeguard should be devised for Mrs. Ellison. I had no intention of letting the police know that we had any connection with her. But if she merely discovered that we were both inexplicably absent for the night it would prey on her nerves. Already the delayed action of shock had caught up with her and the doctor was calling twice a day.

I enlisted my old ally, but I dared not tell the truth even to him. Turpin’s face was blank as he listened to my explanation that I was taking Varvara to see some friends outside London in order to distract her mind.

‘There’s something going on in it,’ agreed Turpin, ‘but I wouldn’t have said it was grief for ’er uncle.’

‘That’s as may be. The point is that the trains back from this place are very irregular. If we were to miss our connection we might decide to stay the night. No one is to worry.’

‘Wheels within wheels,’ said Turpin.

‘I wish I could be sure which way most of them are going round.’

I am afraid that, for once, he was slightly shocked by a suspicion that I was using the disorganization of the household to indulge in a frolic with the Bud. But I knew that I could rely on him.

Later I went out to my bank and drew an uncomfortably large sum. I was toying with the idea that if we could pay an immediate fine in cash we might get away under the old guise of John Smith and Jane Brown.

I had never before realized the appalling number of minor snags which crop up along any trail of deception. For instance, I should not need luggage nor would Varvara; but I could not tell that to a girl who believed that she might be away for weeks. Even on the basis of the story which I had told to Turpin, our two small suitcases added an embarrassing hazard to our joint exit. And of course, as we stole downstairs, we walked straight into Nurse Fillis. She gave an audible gasp: then with a convulsive effort she screwed her features into a sad, forgiving smile. It revealed an unexpected degree of charity, but not, I feared, enough to act as a permanent silencer.

We went by taxi to Charing Cross where we found that there was half an hour to wait for the next train. The station bar was still open, so I took Varvara in and we had a couple of drinks. Although I had no intention of enacting my role literally—indeed it would have been fatal to lose control of my wits—I doubted whether I should have the nerve to carry out the programme in cold blood.

Since it was a rather sordid stretch of line, with rolling-stock to match, I had taken first-class tickets. Even so an interesting black dust came out of the cushions as we sat down. We shared the carriage with another couple who appeared strangely out of their element: an amiable-looking youngish man who might have been an ex-Guards stockbroker, and a very smartly dressed girl who turned out to be his wife. It was impossible not to learn the relationship between them and a number of additional facts, because they addressed each other with that penetrating clarity which belongs either to the lowest or the highest circles. He was, I gathered, a prospective Parliamentary candidate for one of the riverside constituencies, and he was going down to speak at some function.

The woman began to stare at Varvara with the same frankness which marked her speech. Nevertheless, of their type, neither of them struck me as objectionable people. But I was surprised when they took the opportunity provided by a struggle with a jammed window to get into conversation. Perhaps they thought that nobody would travel on that line unless he had local ties which made him a potential voter.

‘Goodness, how foul!’ said the woman, warding off a large smut. ‘By train, this journey really is the end.’

‘It’s as bad by car,’ said her husband.

‘Oh no, darling. That way you get the sights, but not the dirt.’ She turned to Varvara with a smile. ‘Don’t you agree?’

Varvara looked out of the window at a sordid procession of backyards.

‘It is as poor as a dunghill,’ she said.

The girl blenched slightly, but both of them were more broad-minded or made of sterner stuff than their appearance suggested. The man seemed to think that there might be some political implication in Varvara’s remark and tried to improve the occasion.

‘I don’t say there isn’t a lot round here and elsewhere that needs putting right. But it’s a great mistake to suppose that the Government is doing nothing. They have their eye on the situation.’

Varvara nodded understandingly.

‘No doubt their troops are ready.’

This sabre-slashing approach to economic problems was too much for even the keenest Right Winger.

‘Really, I don’t think there’s any risk of that being necessary.’

His wife, however, either did not believe in criticizing allies for too much zeal or else she realized that they had chosen the wrong subject for a canvass, for she went back to her previous theme about the horrors of rail-travel. ‘I dare say you’re in the same boat as us—car laid up.’

‘Yes,’ said Varvara, ‘one of our cars is smashed at Maidenhead.’

‘Really?’ said the man with a slightly satirical smile. ‘And the other?’

Varvara thought for a moment.

‘We have lent it to a poor trader to carry his merchandise,’ she replied magnificently.

The exchanges continued, but less briskly because they were clogged by mystification. Varvara in her present state was probably more baffling to strangers than when she had first arrived in England. Her choice of words and idioms was still touched with eccentricity: but her former gruff, rather alien accent had been fined down to vanishing-point. This combination, when superimposed on her unexpected outlook, sometimes made people wonder whether they were being guyed.

At Horrage we duly got out and left our bags in the cloakroom. When we had given up our tickets and were walking across the familiar cobbled forecourt of the station, I said:

‘Why the devil did you want to tell them those lies?’

‘It was her feet,’ said Varvara.

‘Her what?’

‘They were so small,’ said Varvara, looking down at her own, which were shapely but bore the same relation to the feet of the girl in the carriage as the fetlock of a Percheron to that of a first-class hunter. ‘Also, she spoke with a very ladylike voice.’

‘One day,’ I said unpleasantly, ‘you’ll know enough not to be jealous of a pseudo-Mayfair whine.’

These asperities were partly calculated in order to take Varvara’s mind off the fact that, so far as the present vista of Horrage extended, we might never have left London. There stretched before us the same sort of dingy street as we had left sleeping in the sunshine behind the main thoroughfares of Paddington and Bayswater. If Varvara jibbed and began to demand forests and deserts it might wreck my plan. It was not easy to find a piece of unoccupied country in that area, nor, having done so, to create an effective disturbance in it. However, I need not have worried, for she accepted her surroundings without demur. The fact was that so many things had recently happened to her within an alien framework that she no longer had any orientations.