Chapter 5

MARTINS SAT ON a hard chair just inside the stage door of the Josefstadt Theatre. He had sent up his card to Anna Schmidt after the matinée, marking it ‘a friend of Harry’s’. An arcade of little windows, with lace curtains and the lights going out one after another, showed where the artists were packing up for home, for the cup of coffee without sugar, the roll without butter to sustain them for the evening performance. It was like a little street built indoors for a film set, but even indoors it was cold, even cold to a man in a heavy overcoat, so that Martins rose and walked up and down underneath the little windows. He felt, he said, rather like a Romeo who wasn’t sure of Juliet’s balcony.

He had had time to think: he was calm now, Martins not Rollo was in the ascendant. When a light went out in one of the windows and an actress descended into the passage where he walked, he didn’t even turn to take a look. He was done with all that. He thought, Kurtz is right. They are all right. I’m behaving like a romantic fool. I’ll just have a word with Anna Schmidt, a word of commiseration, and then I’ll pack and go. He had quite forgotten, he told me, the complication of Mr Crabbin.

A voice over his head called ‘Mr Martins’, and he looked up at the face that watched him from between the curtains a few feet above his head. It wasn’t a beautiful face, he firmly explained to me, when I accused him of once again mixing his drinks. Just an honest face; dark hair and eyes which in that light looked brown; a wide forehead, a large mouth which didn’t try to charm. No danger anywhere, it seemed to Rollo Martins, of that sudden reckless moment when the scent of hair or a hand against the side alters life. She said, ‘Will you come up, please? The second door on the right.’

There are some people, he explained to me carefully, whom one recognizes instantaneously as friends. You can be at ease with them because you know that never, never will you be in danger. ‘That was Anna,’ he said, and I wasn’t sure whether the past tense was deliberate or not.

Unlike most actresses’ rooms this one was almost bare; no wardrobe packed with clothes, no clutter of cosmetics and grease-paints; a dressing-gown on the door, one sweater he recognized from Act II on the only easy chair, a tin of half-used paints and grease. A kettle hummed softly on a gas ring. She said, ‘Would you like a cup of tea? Someone sent me a packet last week – sometimes the Americans do, instead of flowers, you know, on the first night.’

‘I’d like a cup,’ he said, but if there was one thing he hated it was tea. He watched her while she made it, made it, of course, all wrong: the water not on the boil, the teapot unheated, too few leaves. She said, ‘I never quite understand why English people like tea.’

He drank his cupful quickly like a medicine and watched her gingerly and delicately sip at hers. He said, ‘I wanted very much to see you. About Harry.’

It was the dreadful moment; he could see her mouth stiffen to meet it.

‘Yes?’

‘I had known him twenty years. I was his friend. We were at school together, you know, and after that – there weren’t many months running when we didn’t meet …’

She said, ‘When I got your card, I couldn’t say no. But there’s nothing really for us to talk about, is there? – nothing.’

‘I wanted to hear –’

‘He’s dead. That’s the end. Everything’s over, finished. What’s the good of talking?’

‘We both loved him.’

‘I don’t know. You can’t know a thing like that – afterwards. I don’t know anything any more except –’

‘Except?’

‘That I want to be dead too.’

Martins told me, ‘Then I nearly went away. What was the good of tormenting her because of this wild idea of mine? But instead I asked her one question. “Do you know a man called Cooler?”’

‘An American?’ she asked. ‘I think that was the man who brought me some money when Harry died. I didn’t want to take it, but he said Harry had been anxious – at the last moment.’

‘So he didn’t die instantaneously?’

‘Oh, no.’

Martins said to me, ‘I began to wonder why I had got that idea so firmly into my head, and then I thought it was only the man in the flat who told me so – no one else. I said to her, “He must have been very clear in his head at the end – because he remembered about me too. That seems to show that there wasn’t really any pain.”’

‘That’s what I tell myself all the time.’

‘Did you see the doctor?’

‘Once. Harry sent me to him. He was Harry’s own doctor. He lived near by, you see.’

Martins suddenly saw in that odd chamber of the mind that constructs such pictures, instantaneously, irrationally, a desert place, a body on the ground, a group of birds gathered. Perhaps it was a scene from one of his own books, not yet written, forming at the gate of consciousness. It faded, and he thought how odd that they were all there, just at that moment, all Harry’s friends – Kurtz, the doctor, this man Cooler; only the two people who loved him seemed to have been missing. He said, ‘And the driver? Did you hear his evidence?’

‘He was upset, scared. But Cooler’s evidence exonerated him. No, it wasn’t his fault, poor man. I’ve often heard Harry say what a careful driver he was.’

‘He knew Harry too?’ Another bird flapped down and joined the others round the silent figure on the sand who lay face down. Now he could tell that it was Harry, by the clothes, by the attitude like that of a boy asleep in the grass at a playing-field’s edge, on a hot summer afternoon.

Somebody called outside the window, ‘Fräulein Schmidt.’

She said, ‘They don’t like one to stay too long. It uses up their electricity.’

He had given up the idea of sparing her anything. He told her, ‘The police say they were going to arrest Harry. They’d pinned some racket on him.’

She took the news in much the same way as Kurtz. ‘Everybody’s in a racket.’

‘I don’t believe he was in anything serious.’

‘No.’

‘But he may have been framed. Do you know a man named Kurtz?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘He wears a toupée.’

‘Oh.’ He could tell that that struck home. He said, ‘Don’t you think that it was odd they were all there – at the death? Everybody knew Harry. Even the driver, the doctor …’

She said with hopeless calm, ‘I’ve wondered that too, though I didn’t know about Kurtz. I wondered whether they’d murdered him, but what’s the use of wondering?’

‘I’m going to get those bastards,’ Rollo Martins said.

‘It won’t do any good. Perhaps the police are right. Perhaps poor Harry got mixed up –’

‘Fräulein Schmidt,’ the voice called again.

‘I must go.’

‘I’ll walk with you a bit of the way.’

The dark was almost down; the snow had ceased for a while to fall, and the great statues of the Ring, the prancing horses, the chariots and eagles, were gun-shot grey with the end of evening. ‘It’s better to give up and forget,’ Anna said. The moonlit snow lay ankle-deep on the unswept pavements.

‘Will you give me the doctor’s address?’

They stood in the shelter of a wall while she wrote it down for him.

‘And yours too?’

‘Why do you want that?’

‘I might have news for you.’

‘There isn’t any news that would do any good now.’ He watched her from a distance board her tram, bowing her head against the wind, a dark question mark on the snow.