The Fallen Curtain (3 page)

The Man thrust his way through the bushes, making for the pond. The boy would be away by now, but not far away. And his legs were long enough and strong enough to outrun him, his hands strong enough to ensure there would be no future of doubt and fear and curtained memory.

But he was nowhere, nowhere. And yet…. What was that sound, as of stealthy, fearful feet creeping away? He wheeled round, and there was the boy coming towards him, walking a little timidly between the straight, grey tree trunks
towards
him. A thick constriction gripped his throat. There must have been something in his face, some threatening gravity made more intense by the half-dark, that stopped the boy in his tracks. Run, Barry, run, run fast away….

They stared at each other for a moment, for a lifetime, for twelve long years. Then the boy gave a merry laugh, fearless and innocent. He ran forward and flung himself into the Man’s arms, and the Man, in a great release of pain and anguish, lifted the boy up, lifted him laughing into his own laughing face. They laughed with a kind of rapture at finding each other at last, and in the dark, under the whispering trees, each held the other close in an embrace of warmth and friendship.

“Come on,” Richard said, “I’ll take you home. I don’t know what I was doing, bringing you here in the first place.”

“To play hide and seek,” said Barry. “We had a nice time.”

They got back into the car. It was after seven when they got to Upfield High Road, but not much after.

“I don’t reckon my mum’s got in yet.”

“I’ll drop you here. I won’t go up to your place.” Richard opened the car door to let him out. “Barry?”

“What is it, mister?”

“Don’t ever take a lift from a Man again, will you? Promise me?”

Barry nodded. “O.K.”

“I once took a lift from a stranger, and for years I couldn’t remember what had happened. It sort of came back to me tonight, meeting you. I remember it all now. He was all right, just a bit lonely like me. We had fish and chips on Drywood Common and played hide and seek like you and me, and he brought me back nearly to my house—like I’ve brought you. But it wouldn’t always be like that.”

“How do you know?”

Richard looked at his strong young man’s hands. “I just know,” he said. “Good-bye, Barry, and—thanks.”

He drove away, turning once to see that the boy was safely in his house. Barry told his mother all about it, but she insisted it must have been a nasty experience and called the police. Since Barry couldn’t remember the number of the car and had no idea of the stranger’s name, there was little they could do. They never found the Man.

People don’t do such things.

That’s the last line of
Hedda Gabler
, and Ibsen makes this chap say it out of a sort of bewilderment at finding truth stranger than fiction. I know just how he felt. I say it myself every time I come up against the hard reality that Reeve Baker is serving fifteen years in prison for murdering my wife, and that I played my part in it, and that it happened to us three. People don’t do such things. But they do.

Real life had never been stranger than fiction for me. It had always been beautifully pedestrian and calm and pleasant, and all the people I knew jogged along in the same sort of way. Except Reeve, that is. I suppose I made a friend of Reeve and enjoyed his company so much because of the contrast between his manner of living and my own, and so that when he had gone home I could say comfortably to Gwendolen, “How dull our lives must seem to Reeve!”

An acquaintance of mine had given him my name when he had got into a mess with his finances and was having trouble with the Inland Revenue. As an accountant with a good many writers among my clients, I was used to their irresponsible attitude to money—the way they fall back on the excuse of artistic temperament for what is, in fact, calculated tax evasion—and I was able to sort things out for Reeve and show him how to keep more or less solvent. As a way, I suppose, of showing his gratitude, Reeve took Gwendolen and me out to dinner, then we had him over at our place, and after that we became close friends.

Writers and the way they work hold a fascination for ordinary chaps like me. It’s a mystery to me where they get their ideas from, apart from constructing the thing and creating character and making their characters talk and so on. But Reeve could do it all right, and set the whole lot at the court of Louis Quinze or in mediaeval Italy or what not. I’ve read all nine of his historical novels and admired what you might call
his virtuosity. But I only read them to please him really. Detective stories were what I preferred and I seldom bothered with any other form of fiction.

Gwendolen once said to me it was amazing Reeve could fill his books with so much drama when he was living drama all the time. You’d imagine he’d have got rid of it all on paper. I think the truth was that every one of his heroes was himself, only transformed into Cesare Borgia or Casanova. You could see Reeve in them all, tall, handsome, and dashing as they were, and each a devil with the women. Reeve had got divorced from his wife a year or so before I’d met him, and since then he’d had a string of girl friends—models, actresses, girls in the fashion trade, secretaries, journalists, school-teachers, high-powered lady executives, and even a dentist. Once when we were over at his place he played us a record of an aria from
Don Giovanni
—another character Reeve identified with and wrote about. It was called the Catalogue Song and it listed all the types of girls the Don had made love to, blonde, brunette, redhead, young, old, rich, poor, ending up with something about as long as she wears a petticoat you know what he does. Funny, I even remember the Italian for that bit, though it’s the only Italian I know.
Purche porti la gonella voi sapete quel che fa.
Then the singer laughed in an unpleasant way, laughed to music with a seducer’s sneer, and Reeve laughed too, saying it gave him a fellow-feeling.

I’m old-fashioned, I know that. I’m conventional. Sex for marriage, as far as I’m concerned, and what sex you have before marriage—I never had much—I can’t help thinking of as a shameful, secret thing. I never even believed that people did have much of it outside marriage. All talk and boasting, I thought. I really did think that. And I kidded myself that when Reeve talked of going out with a new girl he meant going out with. Taking out for a meal, I thought, and dancing with and taking home in a taxi, and then maybe a good-night kiss on the doorstep. Until one Sunday morning, when Reeve was coming over for lunch, I phoned him to ask if he’d meet us in the pub for a pre-lunch drink. He sounded half asleep and I
could hear a girl giggling in the background. Then I heard him say, “Get some clothes on, lovey, and make us a cup of tea, will you? My head’s splitting.”

I told Gwendolen.

“What did you expect?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought you’d be shocked.”

“He’s very good-looking and he’s only thirty-seven. It’s natural.” But she had blushed a little. “I am rather shocked,” she said. “We don’t belong in his sort of life, do we?”

And yet we remained in it, on the edge of it. As we got to know Reeve better, he put aside those small prevarications he had employed to save our feelings. And he would tell us, without shyness, anecdotes of his amorous past and present. The one about the girl who was so possessive that even though he had broken with her, she had got into his flat in his absence and been lying naked in his bed when he brought his new girl home that night; the one about the married woman who had hidden him for two hours in her wardrobe until her husband had gone out; the girl who had come to borrow a pound of sugar and had stayed all night; fair girls, dark girls, plump, thin, rich, poor….
Purche porti la gonella voi sapete quel che fa.

“It’s another world,” said Gwendolen.

And I said, “How the other half lives.”

We were given to clichés of this sort. Our life was a cliché, the commonest sort of life led by middle-class people in the Western world. We had a nice detached house in one of the right suburbs, solid furniture, and lifetime-lasting carpets. I had my car and she hers. I left for the once at half past eight and returned at six. Gwendolen cleaned the house and went shopping and gave coffee mornings. In the evenings we liked to sit at home and watch television, generally going to bed at eleven. I think I was a good husband. I never forgot my wife’s birthday or failed to send her roses on our anniversary or omitted to do my share of the dishwashing. And she was an excellent wife, romantically inclined, not sensual. At any rate, she was never sensual with me.

She kept every birthday card I ever sent her, and the Valentines I sent her while we were engaged. Gwendolen was one of those women who hoard and cherish small mementoes. In a drawer of her dressing table she kept the menu card from the restaurant where we celebrated our engagement, a picture postcard of the hotel where we spent our honeymoon, every photograph of us that had ever been taken, our wedding pictures in a leather-bound album. Yes, she was an arch-romantic, and in her diffident way, with an air of daring, she would sometimes reproach Reeve for his callousness.

“But you can’t do that to someone who loves you,” she said when he had announced his brutal intention of going off on holiday without telling his latest girl friend where he was going or even that he was going at all. “You’ll break her heart.”

“Gwendolen, my love, she hasn’t got a heart. Women don’t have them. She has another sort of machine, a combination of telescope, lie detector, scalpel, and castrating device.”

“You’re too cynical,” said my wife. “You may fall in love yourself one day and then you’ll know how it feels.”

“Not necessarily. As Shaw said”—Reeve was always quoting what other writers had said—“‘Don’t do unto others as you would have others do unto you, as we don’t all have the same tastes.’”

“We all have the same taste about not wanting to be ill-treated.”

“She should have thought of that before she tried to control my life. No, I shall quietly disappear for a while. I mightn’t go away, in fact. I might just say I’m going away and lie low at home for a fortnight. Fill up the deep freeze, you know, and lay in a stock of liquor. I’ve done it before in this sort of situation. It’s rather pleasant and I get a hell of a lot of work done.”

Gwendolen was silenced by this and, I must say, so was I. You may wonder, after these examples of his morality, just what it was I saw in Reeve. It’s hard now for me to remember. Charm, perhaps, and a never-failing hospitality; a rueful way of talking about his own life as if it was all he could hope for, while mine was the ideal all men would aspire to; a helplessness
about his financial affairs combined with an admiration for my grasp of them; a manner of talking to me as if we were equally men of the world, only I had chosen the better part. When invited to one of our dull, modest gatherings, he would always be the exciting friend with the witty small talk, the reviver of a failing party, the industrious barman; above all, the one among our friends who wasn’t an accountant, a bank manager, a solicitor, a general practitioner, or a company executive. We had his books on our shelves. Our friends borrowed them and told their friends they’d met Reeve Baker at our house. He gave us a cachet that raised us enough centimetres above the level of the bourgeoisie to make us interesting.

Perhaps, in those days, I should have asked myself what it was he saw in us.

  It was about a year ago that I first sensed a coolness between Gwendolen and Reeve. The banter they had gone in for, which had consisted in wry confessions or flirtatious compliments from him, and shy, somewhat maternal reproofs from her, stopped almost entirely. When we all three were together they talked to each other through me, as if I were their interpreter. I asked Gwendolen if he’d done something to upset her.

She looked extremely taken aback. “What makes you ask?”

“You always seem a bit peeved with him.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll try to be nicer. I didn’t know I’d changed.”

She had changed to me too. She flinched sometimes when I touched her, and although she never refused me, there was an apathy about her love-making.

“What’s the matter?” I asked her after a failure which disturbed me because it was so unprecedented.

She said it was nothing, and then: “We’re getting older. You can’t expect things to be the same as when we were first married.”

“For God’s sake,” I said, “you’re thirty-five and I’m thirty-nine. We’re not in our dotage.”

She sighed and looked unhappy. She had become moody and difficult. Although she hardly opened her mouth in Reeve’s presence, she talked about him a lot when he wasn’t there, seizing upon almost any excuse to discuss him and speculate about his character. And she seemed inexplicably annoyed when, on our tenth wedding anniversary, a greetings card arrived addressed to us both from him. I, of course, had sent her roses. At the end of that week I missed a receipt for a bill I’d paid—as an accountant, I’m naturally circumspect about these things—and I searched through our wastepaper basket, thinking I might have thrown it away. I found it, and I also found the anniversary card I’d sent Gwendolen to accompany the roses.

All these things I noticed. That was the trouble with me—I noticed things but I lacked the experience of life to add them up and make a significant total. I didn’t have the worldly wisdom to guess why my wife was always out when I phoned her in the afternoons, or why she was for ever buying new clothes. I noticed, I wondered, that was all.

I noticed things about Reeve too. For one thing, that he’d stopped talking about his girl friends.

“He’s growing up at last,” I said to Gwendolen.

She reacted with warmth, with enthusiasm. “I really think he is.”

But she was wrong. He had only three months of what I thought of as celibacy. And then when he talked of a new girl friend, it was to me alone. Confidentially, over a Friday-night drink in the pub, he told me of this “marvellous chick,” twenty years old, he had met at a party the week before.