The Walking Stick (36 page)

There was another one which still had a paper clip attached. The clip had gone rusty with the damp air, and the money enclosed had long since been used. This said: ‘
If you can make it
all right with her take her to Spain. Sunshine is very useful for softening ladies up. I’ll foot the bill. J.F
.’

The water had boiled away. The kitchen was full of steam. I switched off the electricity and tried to vomit in the sink. Nothing came up.

I went into the tiny bedroom and collapsed on the bed. I lay diagonally across it, head without pillows, stretching my stomach.

I was walking hand in hand with Leigh across the soft green slopes toward Beachy Head. It waved like a sea, and in the distance were yellow cushions that seemed sometimes to be cushions and
sometimes to be toadstools. Leigh’s hand was clammy, and I came to understand that Leigh also was a part of the decay of the world. Nothing grew but what grew in cellars and breathed poison
and foul air. Corruption, death and decay. The contamination of disease that I had suffered at the age of eleven was nothing to the contamination that my mind and soul suffered now. The room was
beginning slowly to go round. Every second I stared at the yellow toadstools the spinning world went faster.

I rolled off the bed and fell to the floor, body on the carpet, knee bruised, face on the cold linoleum.

Time passed. I lay very still. If I made no move perhaps it would go away. Yet nothing could take away the fetid and sticky emanation of the truth.

The distant clock chimed a half hour. Raise head. Get slowly to feet. Weak, frail, cold.

On top of the wardrobe were the two suitcases in which I had brought most of my things to this place.

Shakily I stretched up, lifted one down, opened it. Open wardrobe. Underclothes, stockings, skirts, hardly know where to begin. Shoes, frocks, summer coats; as always, more grew even in a few
months than had ever been brought by case. And there was the porcelain in the next room. None of it broken yet, even after two moves. ‘
Dear Leigh, please send me the Coalport plate painted
with flowers by William Cook. I have paid the two bills I owe but not the groceries . . .
’

Hands still shaking like malaria. I folded three summer frocks, laid them in; two skirts, a couple of blouses. Ten minutes to pack the case. That done, I clicked the catches, lifted it off the
bed, looked up at the other case, could not somehow begin on the next.

Couldn’t act. Couldn’t rest. Back into the studio. A ship was going past the windows, gaily lighted. I opened the French windows and stood out on the balcony to watch the lighted
ship disappear round the bend of the river. It was like the last of my hope and my love.

Sheltered here, not cold. I thought of the firework party, when all had gone so well. I thought of New Year’s Eve and the Very lights and the echoing sirens, echoing in the distance. I
thought and thought, and there was nothing my mind could touch that wasn’t contaminated.

I thought more clearly of all the time since last April: the early meetings, the separation, the coming together, the portrait, the holiday, the break with my family, the suggestion first put
forward in November and the gradual procession of events since. I thought of learning to skate and learning to dance and learning to drive. I thought of learning to love.

When I got back in the studio I was shivering. I put on heavy winter coat and scarf against a cold that was not the winter cold. Yet all this time my mind was exploring the shock, even while my
body still cringed from it. It was like someone badly wounded whose mind moves ever more rationally and clearly, even while death is creeping up toward it.

One last thing. One last point to clear up. I went out, leaving all the lights on, walked to the nearest telephone box, opposite the
Brunel
. I looked up a Temple Bar number. Still no
threepenny bits. A sixpence went in.

‘Safeguard headquarters.’

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I wonder if you could help me. I wanted to know how Mr Evans was. Whether he was back on duty.’

The man’s voice said: ‘I’m sorry, we don’t answer personal calls.’

‘Oh,
I’m
sorry. I understood he’d been very ill. It’s his niece speaking. He didn’t tell me he’d been ill at all.’

A pause. ‘Hold the line, please.’

I could hear faint whispering. After a minute or so the same voice said: ‘What name was it?’

‘Evans.’ I gave an apologetic laugh. ‘Sometimes people call him “Baker” Evans, I think.’

‘What’s your name, caller?’

‘Clara Evans.’

Pause. ‘I’m sorry. There’s no one of that name employed in our organization.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Hold the line, please.’

Another pause, and then a new voice came on. ‘Miss – er – what is the name? Miss Evans? Where are you calling from?’

‘A call box. I only rang to inquire about my uncle, if he was better.’

‘Your uncle being employed by our organization?’

‘Yes. One of the security guards.’

‘Would you give me your full name and address, please.’

‘Clara Evans of – of 121 Sutton Street, Hampstead.’

‘I don’t think we can help you, Miss Evans. What is the number of your call box?’

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter.’ I hung up.

I came out of the box, stood a minute leaning against the side. This was a half-developed, half-condemned area in which waste land, new tall blocks of flats and tiny old houses jostled each
other. The small seedy pub with the green blinds looked more like a film set than a piece of London, for the house on one side had been pulled down, and on the other was a gaunt acre of dumped
rusty corrugated iron with two ruined cottages in the middle. The green blinds of the pub stood separated from all other lights. I walked across and went in.

It was early for a crowd even though Friday night. The barman was fiftyish, big and square headed, and there was something wrong with one side of his face. I ordered a large brandy.

So deep had the knife gone in that ordinary feelings no longer registered. Lame – it didn’t matter. Venomous, assessing stares – they didn’t matter. Wrong change. A
cackle directed at me from a girl in carpet slippers. I drank the brandy – no judge but it was harsh stuff.

Prostitutes no different from West End prostitutes. One fat one had holes in her nylons through which bulged little balloons of flesh. Cheapest dresses –
couldn’t
they afford
better than that? But maybe the dresses didn’t count. Three Scandinavian seamen; blond, bony, bad types. A Slav of some sort, unshaven for a week and drunk already. Two spider-legged English
boys with long hair. A middle-aged man in a boiler suit. Two old women in carpet slippers.

Silence while I drank. They were watching me. The barman with the plastic surgery face went on sweeping the counter round and round with a dirty yellow rag. Then he blew his nose on the rag and
stuffed it in his pocket. I ordered another brandy before the first had gone down. He stared at me and took my glass and pressed it up against the upturned bottle. This time I gave him the right
money.

‘Lost your way, dear?’ It was one of the old women.

I stared back at her. No fear. I knew as much of evil as these people. They couldn’t harm me the way I’d already been harmed. What was violence?

Then one of the tarts giggled to draw attention to herself and began to chat to her friend. One or two of the men still watched me, but talk began to break out again. I heard nothing of their
talk. It was like the humming and crackling of a radio when the station has closed down.

The barman had said something. ‘What?’

‘Bin ’avin’ a day out?’

I put the glass down.

‘What’s wrong wi’ yer leg? Accident?’

The brandy was alight in me, and grief, the uttermost grief, was turning to a terrible anger.

‘Mine was a car,’ he said. ‘Went through the bleedin’ screen. Six bleedin’ cars piled up one on top o’ thother. Two stiffs, and me wi’ me face pulped
like minced liver. Twelve weeks in ’ospital. Nother o’ the same?’

‘Yes.’

One of the men who had been sitting back was at the bar, standing beside me. It was the Slav. I paid for my third drink.

‘Never been able to go in a flamin’ car since,’ said the barman. ‘I git the shivers, minute I put me foot in, like I got bleedin’ flu. Shock, they say.’

‘’Allo,’ said the Slav, and put his hand against my thigh, stroking it. I lifted the glass and looked at him with all the grief and anger and hatred. To dash the glass into his
face, to make
him
the next for twelve weeks in hospital . . .

He stepped back. Something had communicated, even though I said nothing, even though he was drunk.

‘’Alf pint?’ said the barman.

The man nodded. ‘You come ’ome with me, eh?’ he said, smiling, but the smile was half-hearted. I didn’t answer. He was part of the background. If he had struck me
he’d still have been part of the background; just something on the periphery of hateful life.

Every now and then since I came out, feelings had come over me as if my head and my heart could contain no more and would swell up and burst. But brandy was helping; it was a solvent, an
anticoagulant, helping reason and hurt and hate and disgust and anger and misery to flow. I could consider the idea of killing myself – not as an act of insane despair but as a rational way
out. I could consider the means; I had no drugs; the river, of course, was the answer. I could think of the other alternatives to suicide.

I finished this brandy. On the wall of the pub, above the bench where two of the girls were sitting, was a row of comic cartoons:
Gin and It, Black and Tan, Mild and Bitter
. The women
thought I was looking at them, and one of them opened her mouth, put her finger in and made an obscene noise.

Somehow I got out of the pub. I was feeling stronger, colder, clearer, but I only remember standing in the shadow of the wall outside and watching the drunken Slav come out; I remember watching
and wondering if he would see me. I didn’t hide, because it didn’t matter.

After he had passed I walked home. It was twenty minutes to nine when I got back. No car.

I went in. The lights burned. I had not shut the door onto the balcony properly and it had blown open. I shut it and sank into one of the leather chairs.

Time passed. Maybe if I’d had someone to talk to then: a friend, a mother, a sister, a priest . . . It needed to be talked out in this time of clarity. To talk, to rage, to weep. This was
a venom, a poison which should have been let. Suck out the bite of the snake. Otherwise I’d die. My heart was adrift.

But out of all the sickness and the self-damnation, out of blasphemy and derision, out of hate and impurity, an intent was showing up, like a hard seaweed-covered rock as the sewer tide went
down.

I went to the desk, dragged a chair over, sat down. Think. Whom would this affect? Everybody I knew and hated. Everybody I knew and loved. Think. This is another form of suicide, slower acting,
more disgraceful, with perhaps some life to be lived at the end of it. Think. This damns all, more effectively,
far
more effectively than a sodden corpse drifting out with the morning tide.
This too is worse for me, far worse for me. Death is tidy; it shuts the door, draws a line in the ledger, shames gossip,
de mortuis nil nisi bonum
; poor girl, it was a frightful pity, and we
never knew the
reason
– well, of course it was
thought
, but the post mortem showed she
wasn’t
; anyway who cares about that these days? . . . The coroner said . . .
I’m sorry for her parents; and of course Leigh Hartley who, though perhaps a bit of a layabout, was
devoted
to her; no reason, my dear, no, no reason . . .

Death is tidy. This solution is untidy,
untidy
. And disgraceful. And full of the light of pure, baleful reason. But
this
is the one I want; this, God helping me and giving me
strength, is the one I intend to
take
.

Address the envelope first and then there can be no error. A very short address. ‘
Detective Inspector Malcolm. Scotland Yard. S.W.1.
’

What I write is quite brief. After all, there’s no need to elaborate in writing. Talk will do that. A statement, that’s what they call it, isn’t it, a
statement will do that. ‘
I, Deborah Dainton . . .
’

I am quite explicit, all the same; quite explicit as to what I say and what I do not say. Leigh Hartley, Ted Sandymount, Jack Foil – especially Jack Foil.
We
planned,
we
executed. Whatever alibis have been arranged,
we
executed. Yes, there was an expert safe-breaker, but I never saw his face. Why implicate John Irons? He was – so far as I know –
no part of the conspiracy. I’m no judge, to assess and condemn. I’m only stating my part and mentioning those who planned it.

Surprising how quickly it can be put down. It flows easily off the pen, for there’s no need to qualify or discriminate. Ten minutes. Barely ten minutes. The only hesitation remembering Ted
Sandymount’s address. That done I signed it. Sealed it in an envelope. Gum on the tongue. Even a stamp handy in the drawer. Post it at once. Post it before.

‘Hello, love,’ said Leigh. ‘Did you think I was never coming?’

I get up. Still wearing overcoat, I put letter in left-hand pocket.

‘Hullo. You are a bit late.’

‘Doing a bit of duty work, you know. Can’t say I enjoy it but it’s nice when it’s done.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Oh, just something I had to attend to.’

I went into the kitchen, and he followed me in as he had done last night, while I put on the kettle. He hadn’t noticed the splintered wood on the bottom drawer of the desk. We made casual
conversation. For some reason it didn’t lag. It no longer meant anything.

We drank coffee. He said he was more tired than last night, how about me? I said, oh, yes, more or less. Bed then soon?

He ruffled his hair. ‘I must say you’re still looking a bit flaked-out. Was everything all right today?’