WHEN HELEN LEARNED that it was to be Maurice who would come for her, she was surprised, but she could not be bothered to worry about it. Her mind at the moment was occupied by something far more exciting: two things, in fact. First, the wonderful piece of news she was bringing for Granny; and second the memory of this marvellous evening they had just spent, she and Sandra.
It was hard to say, really, just why it had been so marvellous—so soon, too, after everything had seemed so dreadful, and beyond the reach of cure. Yet already that horrifying episode of a few hours earlier seemed dream-like and utterly remote, as if it belonged to some other life. Sandra had been marvellous; no, more than that; she had simply been Sandra. Just as Helen had hoped, within ten minutes of the dreadful story being told, they had been giggling; and within half an hour there had come upon them one of those miraculous moods of laughter that are almost like great music, transcending one’s ordinary mortal life. They just couldn’t stop laughing; and everything they said or did seemed to add a new and gorgeous dimension to the funniness of it all. By a lucky chance, Sandra’s parents were out this evening, so they had the house to themselves, with nothing to interrupt or dispel the mad, wonderful mood. For supper Sandra invented a crazy, fantastic sauce to go with the warmed-up shepherd’s pie, while Helen punched silly faces on the slices of wonderloaf before putting them in the toaster—and the toasting, of course, made the faces funnier still, and always hilariously reminiscent of someone or other whom they both knew. They could hardly eat for laughing; and afterwards they played Monopoly (which they hadn’t played for ages and ages) but they played it now according to some new, idiotic rules of Sandra’s, which somehow turned it into the most uproariously funny game that either of them had ever played in their lives; by the end they were almost falling about the room with laughter.
The whole evening seemed to Helen to be truly a gift from the gods, for not only was it filled with such laughter as belongs by right only to the immortals on Olympus, but towards the end of it there came down the telephone a piece of news so wonderful that at first Helen could hardly take it in.
It seemed at first the dullest telephone message imaginable; something about dates for collecting jumble for the Conservative Party fête; and then came a long stretch of conversation which consisted (from Helen’s point of view) of Sandra dutifully saying ‘Yes’; and ‘All right, I’ll tell her’—but then, suddenly everything changed. Sandra gave a little gasp. “Are you sure?” she squealed excitedly; “But the voting going against it, does that really mean that it’s not going to happen? They can really stop it?—I say, isn’t that super…!” and after a hasty reassurance to the unseen speaker that yes, she would remember to tell her mother about the jumble, she flung the receiver back into its place, and turned to Helen with shining eyes.
“Your field, Helen! It’s going to be all right! There’s not going to be a road built after all! It’s the town council or something—anyway, they’ve decided against it! So now they won’t want your field to build on, or any of the other fields—nothing! Even if your mother still wants to sell it, nobody’d buy it now! Oh, isn’t it super!”
Helen could not speak. She could only join Sandra in a mad dance round and round the room; and then, with joy, relief and laughter all bubbling up in her soul together, she knew that she must rush home to Granny. News like this would not keep—nor could it be conveyed adequately down the telephone. Helen rushed to collect her coat, her handbag.
And only now did she remember that the last bus would be already gone. Slowly, she made herself come down to earth enough to decide what to do. Sandra’s enthusiastic suggestion that she should stay the night was impractical—not only because of her impatience to tell Granny the good news, but because there was Monday morning to think about too. Her satchel, her books, her school clothes, were all at home.
There was nothing for it but to get Mummy to fetch her in the car. Mummy might be a bit fed up about it, but never mind; what did anything matter when life was being so wonderful?
She was still in a carefree, exalted mood when she climbed into the seat beside Maurice; and when he asked if she would mind if he drove round a longer way, and set her down at the corner a couple of hundred yards beyond her house, she agreed incuriously. Her mind was elsewhere. Should she rush straight up to Granny’s room and pour out the news about the field as soon as she got in? Or should she lead up to it in some exciting, tantalising way, to make the surprise even more wonderful? She tried to picture Granny’s face as the joyful truth began to dawn on her … and only now did Helen notice that the car was beginning to gather speed, just when it should have been slowing down.
“Maurice!” she cried sharply “Stop! The corner—look—we’ve passed it! That’s where I’m to get out …!”
He did not answer. His eyes gleamed fixedly ahead of him along the dark road, and still their speed increased. Sixty … Seventy … and now Helen was really frightened.
“Stop!” she screamed, “Let me out!” and then, when he still made no answer, she began struggling with the handle of the door.
“Stop it, you little fool! You’ll be killed!” He pushed her roughly back into her seat, while the car swerved for a moment alarmingly.
“There! We’ll both get our necks broken if you carry on like that! For God’s sake sit still just till we’re clear … I’ll explain everything. Sit still!”
And Helen did; there was nothing else to be done, with the landscape rocking past at seventy miles an hour. After a long, long time, as it seemed to her, their speed began to slacken, and he spoke again.
“Stop panicking,” he said. “Nothing’s going to happen to you. God knows, I don’t want you with me on this jaunt, but it was the only way to get the car! I meant to put you down at the corner—really I did—but—didn’t you see?—They were there! Waiting for me! I daren’t stop even for a moment!”
“Who were?” Helen was more bewildered than alarmed now. “Do you mean the police—?”
“No! For God’s sake! Why should they be after me? Hadn’t you guessed by now—I’m no more a murderer than you are! The whole story was a lot of balls from beginning to end …”
“Then why on earth …?”
“Listen. For seven years—for seven bloody years, day in and day out, I’ve been writing poetry. Good poetry. Poetry that should have made me famous by now. And has it? Has it hell—Not one bloody ten-and-six have I landed—not so much as one single four-line filler in the lowest of low-brow magazines! Not one! Not in seven years! Yet every time you open a paper you read that some unutterable tripe or other has been published for no other reason than that the chap wrote it with his toes, or while he was still at primary school, or—and here you have it—while he was in prison. International awards they were getting, chaps like that, and television interviews—the lot. Can you wonder that now and then I toyed with the thought of some such gimmick? And then, when I went to that Poetry Group place, and met the Daphne woman, and saw her room papered knee-deep in leaflets about delinquent boys and what-have-you, I thought to myself, well, why not try it on, just for once, and see how this lot react? So I went home to think about it, and at the next meeting I came back and started to drop a few hints—nothing definite, you know—just enough to make them sit up a bit, and take a bit of interest in my work.”
“And did they?”
“My God, and how! Your mother was there, you see, at that meeting—and after that, well, it was as if she’d taken the whole thing out of my hands! I couldn’t not be a murderer after ten minutes talk with her, I wouldn’t have had the heart! And I won’t say I didn’t enjoy it all at first—your mother can make one feel no end of a fine fellow, you know, once she’s convinced of one’s essential wickedness. How could I disillusion her? Besides, by then, there seemed no way out of it. The whole thing had been set going on its own momentum, more and more people had got drawn into it … it was like playing the lead in an important play, you can’t suddenly change your rôle. Also, your mother was talking about all sorts of smashing plans for getting my poems published—and I thought then, you see, that she really did like them … really did think they were good. So I thought to myself, well, good lord, perhaps it really will work out … and then by the time the cat’s out of the bag, they’ll be safely in print and establishing my reputation on their own merits; and then I shan’t worry about anything …”
“And is that what’s going to happen? Or have they found you out, or something? Why are you rushing away like this?”
“Your precious family—and the Daphne woman, too, I daresay—have properly buggered it all up. Between you, you’ve spread it all round town that it was some robbery around here that I was mixed up in—and now these oafs who were really mixed up in it, they’re after me, thinking I know where their goddam money is hidden!”
“But surely they know themselves where it is?” protested Helen reasonably. “I mean, if they were the ones who stole it?”
“Do they hell! If you ask me, the criminal underworld seems to be as much snarled up in red tape and muddle as any government department! Anyway, I gather that these aren’t the chaps who actually stole the money—they’re just mixed up with it on the fringes, somehow—don’t ask me how it all works, I’m just the muggins. Anyway, they’ve got it into their heads that I’ve somehow sneaked out of prison before the rest of the gang, and I’m trying to steal a march on them all and corner the money for myself. Your grandma digging up the chicken run just when she did was no help at all; and then the way she flew at that chap like a tigress when he was just having a bit of a look-see! You can’t blame him thinking there was something funny going on. They pinned it on me, of course—they thought I’d been ganging up with the old lady to bury their blasted money underneath the hen-house! And when I told them the old dear’d just been digging worms for her chickens, they thought I was taking the Mickey, and you can’t wonder…. They nearly beat me up on the spot! And after that, it really hotted up. I could hardly go outside the house without one of them following me…. I saw them hanging about everywhere. They’ve searched my room twice … I’ve had to sit up half the night, sometimes, listening for them …”
Glancing sideways, Helen observed his set, white face. He was afraid; really afraid. In spite of the off-hand mocking tone of his revelations, it was real danger from which he felt himself to be fleeing.
“But why didn’t you tell Mummy the truth, then, when it got as bad as that? Why did you let everyone go on thinking …?”
“The truth? Are you kidding? After all this, to tell your Ma that I’m really a clerk in an insurance office, and that I go home at weekends to my widowed mother? Tell that—to Claudia—after what she’d believed of me? Would you have the nerve?”
Helen saw his point. Mummy would inflict on him that most terrible of all disgraces—she would be very, very sorry for him…. And spending all his free time with his mother, my dear, a young man in his twenties … did you ever hear of anything so peculiar …?
Helen shuddered, and could no longer blame him for sticking to the rôle of murderer. She, of all people, could understand his predicament.
“And so,” continued Maurice, “since I couldn’t face Claudia and I couldn’t face the thugs, the only thing to do was to clear out, fast. And it seemed a real gift from heaven, this business of fetching you home tonight. It meant I could make my get-away in the car. And I did fetch you!” he pointed out defensively. “I was all set to put you down at that corner…. If I’d been a real cad, I’d have cleared out straightaway, and not fetched you at all!”
Helen couldn’t help feeling that this would have made things very much simpler, at least for her.
“So what’s to happen to me now?” she enquired. “How am I supposed to get home from all this way away? And what about the car? I think you’re awful, Maurice, pinching Mummy’s car like this—when she trusted you with it! Don’t you feel dreadful, treating her like that, after all she’s done trying to help you?”
“Yes, ducky. I do. But not as dreadful as I’d feel staying behind and letting those thugs beat me up. Because that’s what was going to happen to me tonight, make no mistake. You see, you have to weigh one thing against another: a guilty conscience against being carved up in some rather nasty way. Me, I choose the guilty conscience—I don’t pretend to be any sort of a hero. Maybe if I was a murderer I’d be behaving more like a gentleman now, because I’d have learned how to stand up to that sort of thing. But as it is I can’t. I’m not made that way. I shouldn’t be in this position!” he burst out in sudden desperation. “It’s not me—it’s not my sort of thing! It’s like putting a chap to fly an aeroplane when he’s never even looked inside the cockpit before…. This is what your mother does to people!”
“Oh, but that’s not fair!” cried Helen loyally. “How can you blame Mummy? It’s all your own fault, all of it. You started it all—”
“Yes—like a fish starts it all by swallowing the bait! He must want to end up on the slab, you’re saying, or he’d have left the bait alone in the first place. But you see, my dear girl, the poor fish doesn’t notice the hook buried in it; that’s the whole idea. Poor Fish Maurice, he thought at first that your mother really did admire his poems, really did think they were worth something. That’s what I can’t forgive, you know: that she never cared a damn about my poetry, only about that phoney murder….”
Helen had no ready answer to all this, but she remained stubborn.
“You’re being very unfair,” she repeated. “Mummy was trying to help you, as best she could. She’s always trying to help unlucky people.”
“Yes? She isn’t, you know. She may have started off that way, years ago, but that isn’t how it is now. All she’s trying to do now is to have unlucky people turning to her for help—a very different matter. She has built herself up as a figure of vast, all-embracing, up-to-date tolerance, and other people are just so much tolerance-fodder for her—and of course the wickeder they are the better they serve! She loves the sin, you might say, but doesn’t care a damn about the sinner. Listen, I don’t know where we are, but here’s a road saying Station Road, so there ought to be a railway station somewhere if you watch out. If there is, shall I drop you off and you can go home by train? You’ll be all right?”
“Of course. Thank you.” Helen lifted her head proudly, and scanned the passing scene for signs of a railway. “But what about the car? I think you’re being terribly mean and beastly about Mummy—she did mean to help you. But at least you’ve got to let her have the car back. Where will it be?”
“Look—here we are—out you get, and for God’s sake do it quickly.—I’ve no time to waste! The car? That’ll be O.K.—I’ll leave it somewhere where they’re bound to find it. Just get out, there’s a good girl!”
Thus unchivalrously dumped in the deserted station yard, Helen stood dazed for a minute, while the car leaped noisily into motion again and roared off along the empty road. Only then, as she turned away, did Helen realise that the station was closed; that it was after midnight; and that she did not even know what town she was in.