The Lily Hand and Other Stories (9 page)

Exactly half an hour earlier, the police had arrested him for falsifying the books of his firm on a dozen separate occasions, and misappropriating to his own use something like five hundred pounds.

I had to touch him before he realized I was there. I sat down in front of him, and took his hands, and my grip seemed to penetrate his consciousness.

But when I said, ‘Hullo, Frank, what's been happening to you?' he only stared at me helplessly, and said, ‘I don't know,' like a child who'd had a fright.

He'd been like that from the first moment, they said. He'd listened to the caution and the charge, and then simply let go of everything. It was too much for him now that it was out in full view. He couldn't grasp it.

All he'd said to the charge was, ‘Yes.' And some minutes later, as though he wanted to explain, ‘She was used to nice things. She didn't understand about money.'

It wasn't much, but it was enough.

He'd been slightly careless, it seemed, over the last transaction, and the amount was bigger, too. Almost all of it was still in the house; he showed them where, moving like a sleepwalker.

So far as he had any mind left he did his best to co-operate. I could understand that. Thirty-two years old, hard-working, a mirror of unassuming respectability, kindly, scrupulous, patient, precise, his natural place was on the side of the law.

There wasn't much I could do for him at that stage, either as probation officer or as friend. His police-court appearance had to be deferred for three weeks or more, because he wasn't fit to be put in the dock.

For two or three days he continued half dead, and then the numbness wore off and he was infinitely worse, alternating between collapse and hysteria. He spent a week under sedatives, and slowly emerged into a sort of calm, a sort of articulate life.

As soon as he was fit to talk to a solicitor I went to see his wife, to urge her to get him into the hands of a good man as quickly as possible.

I'd never really noticed her before, or I should have understood. She received me in the sitting room of their small, respectable house, in a dress which wouldn't have been out of place at an embassy cocktail party, and wearing a sapphire pendant on a platinum chain. Twenty-eight, very pretty, very chic, with a hard, bright finish. Gold hair and a very short, full, hungry mouth.

She was very voluble indeed on the subject of her husband. It had been a terrible shock to her, and she couldn't forgive it. He'd brought disgrace on her, drawn down a barrage of gossip and calumny upon her innocent person. For innocent she certainly felt herself to be, and deeply injured. It was no part of her duty to associate herself with a criminal, and she didn't intend to.

He could get legal aid, couldn't he? She had her own position to think of. If she left the public in any doubt of where she stood she would be doing herself an injustice.

She meant to give evidence for the prosecution. Oh, she knew she wasn't forced to by law, but she owed it to herself. Frank must take the consequences of his own actions, he wasn't going to shuffle them off on to her. As for briefing a lawyer, where did I think she was to get the money? She was left to provide for herself now; not that he ever had been very good at providing for a wife. And besides, there was the principle of the thing!

I was glad to get out of there. The room was as much of a revelation, in its way, as Mrs Willard herself. It was most expensively decorated, and full of possessions. There was a cabinet full of very good china, the carpet was Persian, and the piano a magnificent grand. Jade and cut glass ornamented the shelf over the fireplace. No need to ask where the money had gone. I remembered, too, now that I had the clue, a coat which I'd taken for granted as a mere imitation of the fur it seemed to be. With tastes like that, she obviously had no funds to spare for her husband's defence.

It was I who got him a solicitor. He had wanted to plead guilty, but Grant tried to persuade him to change his plea. He was still inclined to go where he was pushed, past caring where our efforts landed him, since his world had already fallen to pieces; but when he understood that his wife meant to take the stand and give evidence if the case had to be heard in full, he made up his mind irrevocably on a plea of guilty. He was entirely ignorant of the obligations and exemptions of law, and thought he was sparing her a terrible ordeal, and we let him think it. There wasn't much else we could do for him.

The police had opposed bail, purely because they were afraid of what he might do to himself if they let him out of their care. I went to see him shortly before the assizes. He was still a very sick man, he was going to be that for a long time ahead, but in a stunned fashion he could talk coherently and reason sensibly by then. He talked about her; he always did.

‘You know, I never really believed in my luck. Someone as beautiful and gay and bright as Eileen – what could she find in a man like me? She could have married whom she pleased, they were round her thick as bees, fellows with plenty of self-confidence, fellows with good prospects. And she took me and my twelve pounds a week, and no hope of getting any farther!

‘I got to feeling how badly I was letting her down. She was meant to have beautiful things, they're her proper setting, and she loves them so.

‘Oh, you mustn't think she complained! She admired them just like a child, wondering why she couldn't have them, when she wanted them so much. She didn't realize how costly nice things are. Money was something she didn't understand. She just fell in love with things she saw. I couldn't bear it. It was like letting a child starve in front of your eyes.'

Through his labouring voice I could hear hers, that clear, constant, injured voice lamenting that other wives should have things which were out of her reach, reminding him eternally, in oblique ways, that she might have married so-and-so and been well off, that she'd condescended to his hopeless, helpless love, and he owed it to her to maintain her properly. I heard the endless, inescapable implication of his miserable betrayal of her, and her forsaken condition, until everything, even his honour, which meant more to him than to most men nowadays, became expendable in the cause of her happiness.

What he had done was horrible to him, but in the same circumstances he would have done it again. In his own eyes he was damned in any case, and he embraced his damnation if it had given her a few gleams of pleasure.

‘I asked her not to come and see me here,' he said. ‘I couldn't bear that. Not even to write, until the trial's over and everything's settled.'

I thanked God for that, at any rate, since it saved him from wondering and grieving when she didn't come; for, of course, she wouldn't have dreamt of coming near him.

Always, before I left him, he asked me breathlessly, as though the words burst out of his heart and tore their way to his throat without any will of his, ‘Have you seen her? How's she looking?'

I told him she was bearing up admirably. What else could I have done? I couldn't tell him she'd already persuaded the landlord to transfer the tenancy of the house to her, and had been seen out with him in the town on several evenings lately; or that she was reputed to be about to take a part-time job in the box office of the most palatial cinema, whose manager had a somewhat mottled reputation where women were concerned, though to do him justice he never pestered any who were unwilling.

‘The first time,' said Willard, thinking back laboriously over the year of his downfall, ‘it was the fur coat that did it. I was afraid she might guess how I got the money, but she never did.'

She took good care not to, I thought but did not say.

‘And then she was pining for a good piano. She plays well, you know; it was terrible for her, having to be content with a second-rate instrument. I had to get the money somehow. I
had
to get these things for her. You didn't know her – you can't understand.'

I understood too well, but the words that bled out of him were also something I could comprehend and pity.

‘The last time—' his blue eyes, still opaque as
lapis lazuli
in a face petrified in bewildered suffering, stared through me—‘it was because of the Hall being sold, and all those beautiful things coming under the hammer. We had been there one Sunday, when the place was on show last summer, and she had never forgotten. There was a set of Meissen china, white and gold filigree, the prettiest you ever saw – she talked about it for months after. And a little inlaid ivory cabinet and a full-length Venetian mirror in a black glass frame. When she knew they were all to be sold she almost fell ill with longing for them. What could I do? I had to buy them for her. I meant it to be the last time – but you always do mean that.

‘Mr Benson wrote to me – did you know? Such a kind letter, you wouldn't think I'd been robbing him for over a year. I can't write back. Not yet. I'd like to, but I can't do it. Will you give him my thanks, and say – how sorry—'

I always left when he began to cry. Not because the sight embarrassed me, I was long past that, but because about then he seemed to forget I was there, and to lapse into his dazed condition again. Pure exhaustion. I think; talking, thinking, remembering, even existing was physically tiring to him.

Because of his plea of guilty, and his complete submission, and because for once it needed no lawyer to urge that here was a broken man, he got eighteen months. The governor of the prison where he was sent had a long talk with me about him, and the medical officer, who regarded the term as one of sanctuary rather than penance, was furious about the sentence.

‘What in the world do they think we can do with him in only eighteen months?' he wanted to know. ‘From what I've seen so far, he'll spend the first six months more in hospital than out of it, and after that he'll need psychiatric treatment for a hell of a lot longer than the seven or eight months we shall have left. Just when he's within hopeful distance of normality again we shall have to turn him loose and, unless he is exceptionally lucky or tougher than I think he is, he'll end up in a mental hospital within a year after that.'

I felt much the same way about it, but we had to make the best of it. And he responded better than had been expected. He was a model prisoner, co-operative, gentle, anxious as ever to give the minimum trouble and the maximum satisfaction. Something he'd never noticed about himself, and didn't notice now, took over his life in prison and helped him to benefit by it: people easily grew fond of him.

His wife wrote him one letter, sharp and cold as ice, condemning his crime, dissociating herself from it, and stating the measures she was taking for her own maintenance now that he had failed her. It never reached him.

The governor sent it back to her with the request that she would avoid using such a tone in the future, and confine herself to innocuous subjects, if she wanted to help her husband. He need not have troubled, for she had written merely to break off relations, and had no intention of ever writing again. So Willard was spared her whips and scorpions, and he made good progress.

We all dreaded the time when he would have completed his sentence and would be thrown back upon the problem from which only prison was protecting him. I felt so strongly about it that I even went to see his wife again, prepared to beg for her sympathy and help if necessary. I need not have troubled, either.

She overwhelmed me with her righteousness. She'd inquired about divorce, and was amazed and disgusted to be told that she had no grounds, that the imprisonment of one partner didn't absolve the other from their marriage vows. But at least she was absolutely determined that she would never receive or live with him again. The tenancy of the house was now hers, and if Frank came forcing himself on her here she'd slam the door in his face, the dirty crook!

She was brazenly beautiful, indiscreetly jewelled, expensively dressed, and looked somehow both more splendid and more vulgar than when I'd last seen her. The sitting room had new and elegant curtains, and in the china cabinet there was a new tea service – new, that is, to me. White and gold filigree, incredibly delicate and thin. I recognized the Meissen from the Hall by its description. If Frank hadn't managed to give it to her, someone else had. No doubt the ivory cabinet was somewhere about the house, too, I thought. She was a woman who knew how to get what she wanted.

As I was leaving, another visitor arrived, a large, prosperous-looking man climbing out of a large, prosperous-looking car, and swinging in through the gate as if he owned the place. He wasn't the landlord. Was he the cinema manager? I didn't know the fellow very well, but as far as my recollection went he was younger than this specimen.

The man gave me a very narrow and suspicious look from the doorstep as I went away, and I've no doubt as soon as the door was shut he wanted to know who I was, and what I was doing there. She was getting her personal affairs a little involved, was Eileen Willard. I was thankful I couldn't be classed as a competitor. This type I'd seen on race courses, and in certain pubs where somewhat hush-hush business was carried on over short drinks.

The problem of Frank remained.

No use allowing him to walk in all innocence into the kind of reception she would give him. No use leaving him in his fool's purgatory of hope any longer. The governor would have broken it to him, but I volunteered for the job because, almost without meaning to, I seemed to have drawn nearer to Willard than anyone else, and these responsibilities one can't escape.

We were left alone, and I told him exactly how it was. That it was over, that it was no use hoping to make her change her mind. I went further, since there was no help for it. I told him she was no good, never had been, never would be, and that he was well rid of her, though I had no hope at all of convincing him of that.

I told him there was only one thing to do. And he must do it: cut her clean out of his life, and start afresh without her.