Next to his corned beef sandwich was a bowl of dried prunes; since Bettina’s arrival he’d been constipated. His stomach felt hard and bloated and whenever he farted it smelled like faecal matter. Because, very simply, it was having to pass through tiny gaps in a shit-logged canal. He put a prune in his mouth and chewed it slowly.
Bettina appeared at the end of the garden. She was jogging – towards him, seemingly. He took his cigarette packet from the table and leaned back in his chair. Her tits were jiggling around underneath her blouse and her knees were covered in a thick cake of black mud. She slowed to a fast walk. What the hell did she want?
‘Hello, Bettina.’
She planted her hands on the table, trying to catch her breath.
He lit his cigarette and smoked it, waiting calmly. His foot tapping the tiles under the table. Taptaptaptap – the body always found a way to betray you.
‘I need your help,’ she finally said. She pulled out a chair and sank into it, then reached out and grabbed his pint of warm ale, drinking half of it in one.
‘Steady on, woman!’
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Burped. ‘I’m in trouble.’
‘We’re all in trouble, Bettina.’
‘Please don’t – this is serious. Can we please, just for now, forget all our – this is deadly serious and I need you.’
A fly landed on his remaining sandwich half. He brushed at it with his hand and it flew away. ‘Surely your special lady friend might be of better use to you.’
‘Oh my God!’ She raised her hands in the air, fingers snapping out. ‘Why must you always be so bloody difficult? You’re such a child!’
‘That’s rich, coming from you.’
She pressed her hands on the table, fingers fanned out, and looked at him, breathing angrily through her nostrils. ‘Fine. I’ll deal with it myself.’ And she got up, shoving her chair back so that it squeal-scraped against the patio tile, and stormed off towards the house. She’d left a greasy lipstick stain on the rim of his glass. He drank from the other side.
She came back out and went right past him, walking stiffly with one hand at her side – she was holding a gun closely to her hip. A gun. He sprang out of his seat and rushed after her.
‘What the hell—’
She continued to walk, refusing to look at him. ‘I told you it was serious.’
He grabbed her by the arm and she spun around, wild-eyed.
‘Congratulations, you’ve got my attention,’ he said. ‘Now get back in the house and put that thing back where you found it.’
She stamped on his foot and he cried out, letting go of her arm.
‘Either help me or fuck off,’ she said.
Oh, you bitch, he thought, rubbing his slippered foot on the back of his calf and watching her run to the end of the garden. Oh, you bitch. He should just leave her to whatever mess she’d made – it wasn’t his concern, not any more. Imagine he ran up to her, begging for help! She’d laugh in his face. You want me to help you? Oh, how delicious! Hahaha. You silly little man.
She hopped quite effortlessly over the wall and rather than veering left towards the path to the beach she ran straight for the woods.
‘Oh, for Chrissake,’ he said, running after her. He caught up a few yards along the path, cursing as his slippers landed in patches of soggy earth. ‘All right, all right,’ he said. ‘I’m here. Slow down and tell me what’s happened.’
‘You’ll see for yourself soon enough.’
The whole front of his foot got suckered into a boggy oval of mud. ‘Damn! I wish you’d given me the chance to put some proper shoes on.’
‘I’m sorry for not considering your footwear’ – she hopped over a low, overhanging bramble – ‘but I’ve other more pressing concerns right now. Keep up!’
She stopped at the marker tree – Lady Upsy-Downsy-Ooh-la-la … how silly … he’d forgotten all about that. She pointed down the path. ‘Look.’
There, lying in the dirt, was Henry. His shoes were off and he had only one sock on. His hands were tied behind his back with a grey cashmere cardigan – Bettina’s. His face was turned away from them.
‘What have you done?’
‘I knocked him out. He was trying to blackmail me, can you believe it? I bashed him over the head with a rock and I – well, as you can see, I tied him up and stuffed one of his socks in his mouth. He was trying to—’
‘You might have killed him!’
She looked at him with a sudden childish worry, then back at Henry’s pathetic form. He snatched the gun out of her hands and lobbed it far into the bushes.
‘You rotter! You fucking rotter!’ She smacked him hard on the chest and then kicked his shin. ‘He was trying to make me have sex with him!’
‘What?’ He rubbed his shin. ‘Ow, that— What did you say?’
‘He had his – willy out and—’
‘He tried to force you?’
‘Yes! He was blackmailing me. Last night he caught me and Ivy in bed, and he followed me here and said he wanted money. And the rest. He said he’d tell a Hollywood reporter. I said he didn’t have any proof, and he said that rumour was as good as fact in these troubled times. And he started undoing his trousers and he grabbed me – oh, it was horrible – and I managed to kick him in the privates and find a rock – it was awful, Bart, his thing was sticking up and, oh, it was—’
‘He’s a million years old, Betts.’
‘He’s only sixty or so! Are you going to stop wanting to have sex in fifteen years’ time?’
He looked at the man. Imagined him grunting away, his creaking cartilage and fuzzy grey pubic hair, his – but this was Henry! Certainly there was something unsavoury about him – sneaky, you could say. But that was just what butlers were like; they oozed out subservience almost like religious fervour, but secretly they hated your guts.
‘Imagine it’d been you,’ Bettina was saying. ‘It so easily could have been you. A different place and a different person, perhaps, but it might easily have been you in this situation. And what would you have done?’
He shook his head. He didn’t know.
‘Such a ghastly low-down thing, blackmail,’ she said. ‘It boils my blood. You remember that feeling, as a child? When your parents have this enormous power over you and they dangle things over your head and threaten you, and it’s just not fair, it’s just not fair – you remember feeling that way? That feeling of absolute powerlessness …’ She laughed suddenly, her hands massaging her hair as if lathering up shampoo. ‘Power is everything! Indeed it is.’
He reached for his cigarettes, but they weren’t there – he’d left them on the patio table. ‘What are we going to do?’ he said.
‘We?’
‘Don’t make a thing of it. This affects me too. It affects my whole family.’
She sat down on the stump of a felled tree and took her cigarettes out of her pocket. She threw him one and he caught it, just, between the middle and third finger of his left hand. ‘I was going to kill him. But you’ve thrown the gun away now.’
‘You weren’t seriously going to shoot him.’
‘I might have.’
‘No. You wanted me to shoot him. That’s why the whole song and dance in the garden, coming out with the gun.’
‘Must you always have such a cynical opinion of my motives?’
‘Oh, come off it! I know what you’re—’
‘Granted, I hoped you’d see the gun and follow me.’ She held up a finger. ‘That bit was a manipulation on my part. But I think I was hoping you’d talk me out of it and find another solution that didn’t involve murder.’ She frowned, exhaling smoke through a mouth that was turning downwards at the corners – age. ‘You seem to view me as some sort of devil woman, Bart, and frankly, I’m getting a tad bored of it.’
‘That’s not true,’ he said. ‘You’re the one who thinks I’m a terrible person.’
She shrugged. ‘Well, what does it matter now?’
But it did matter, it really did matter. For years now, he’d been waiting for a moment like this, for something to happen that would knock down the icy wall they’d put up – she’d put up – and force them to hash things out. To bloody well scream at each other, to scratch each other’s eyes out – anything was better than the icy wall. Anything was better than silence. But to what outcome? What did he really want to come out of this? Her apology? Her grovelling, blubbering apology? I was wrong and you were right! Please forgive me, husband! No. He couldn’t have it. ‘I suppose we should wake him up and see what he’s got to say for himself,’ she said. ‘Though he’ll just tell us what we want to hear. “I’ll never tell a soul, I promise!”’
‘So what if he did? It’s just his word. He’s just some disgruntled old butler with a vendetta against his cruel masters. And say he did get in contact with some Hollywood tattler, some Louella Parsons or Hedda Hopper, who’s to say they’d care?’ He laughed, bitterly. ‘I can just imagine the look on Louella’s face. “Who cares about the wife of Bartholomew Dawes? For that matter, who cares about Bartholomew Dawes?” I haven’t made a good film in ten years, Betts. No one will care.’
Bettina had one leg crossed over the other in the man’s style, an ankle resting on a knee, and she was picking mud off her boot. ‘I didn’t want to tell you this at the time, what with things being so bad between us,’ she said, eyes on the boot, ‘but I actually rather liked your last film. In fact, I thought it was your best work.’
The Sins of the Fathers, made in 1940, had been his attempt to break out of the horror mould he’d been poured into. It was a prestige picture set in nineteenth-century Kent, about an aristocratic family mired in various scandals. The film was a flop – ‘a bloated, meandering mess’, according to one critic. It had been hyped as the English Gone with the Wind. But it turned out nobody wanted an English Gone with the Wind, not even the English.
‘You really think so?’ he said.
Her eyes stayed on her boot. ‘Absolutely.’
‘That means a lot to me, actually. Though it would have meant more if you’d said it at the time.’
Her eyes flicked up. ‘Why would I give you praise when you’d had nothing nice to say to me in years?’
‘Well, what about you—’ He raised his hands and closed his eyes. ‘Let’s not do this. You make a fair point. Let’s just …’ He trailed off. Let’s just be friends again, he’d been going to say. Friends? she’d say. Are you serious?
They lapsed into silence. A squirrel jumped from one tree branch to another over their heads, and a leaf fell down, just the one, drifting diagonally in the space between them. A green woodpecker let out its shrill, pulsing call somewhere high up in the trees.
‘Do you want to know something?’ Bettina said. ‘I always imagined it would be you in this situation. Never me. I always thought that one day you’d be caught at it and someone would blackmail you. That’s why – do you remember? – that’s why I was so keen for you to sign with MGM. I knew they looked after their stars when things got hairy.’
She said this – of course – with judgement. She’d never been able to conceal her disdain for his sexual drive. It was hypocrisy. If they’d lived in an alternative reality where the woods were crawling with gorgeous women just dying to get on their knees and – in the immortal words of Roger Stamper – eat pussy, Bettina would spend half her nights creeping from tree to tree, dodging the torchlight of park rangers. Of course she would.
‘We would’ve had to move to the States,’ he said. ‘You’d hate LA.’
‘Maybe I would’ve liked the opportunity to find that out for myself. You never asked me to come with you. There was that film you did with Karloff, the one about the haunted college, and it was shot during the summer holidays when the children were home from school. I remember hoping that you’d ask us to come with you. But you never did.’
‘I didn’t want you to come.’
A cynical hitch of the eyebrows. ‘That’s what I thought.’
‘Oh, come on. I didn’t want the children there, Betts. It’s a poisonous environment, Hollywood. I met the children of the stars and they were always such horrible little shits. And the child stars! They swallow little pills with breakfast and then swallow little pills to go to sleep. It’s just a gigantic fuck-up factory. Why let Hollywood fuck up our children?’ He paused. ‘That’s our job, surely.’
She laughed. Mouth opening like a split peach, a dirty smoker’s laugh barking out, followed by a coughing fit. She actually laughed! When was the last time he’d … He couldn’t remember. He joined in, a hand half shielding his eyes. His belly felt warm and nervy – how starved he’d been of her laugh. She tossed him another cigarette. He lit it, glancing at the unconscious man a few feet away, almost surprised to find him still there.
‘So what’s she like?’ he asked. ‘Your woman?’
‘Lovely. Lovely. I’ll be honest – I only really went for her because … well, it’s not as though there’s ever an abundance of women for me to choose from, and one gets so … frustrated. Physically, I mean. She was just there. But it turns out she’s a perfect fit and I think I might even be falling in – you know.’ Blushing, she returned her attention to her boot – there was still some mud on it, apparently. ‘What about you? Have you – is there a special someone?’
He shook his head. Thought of Archie, who he was still trying to will himself to desire (he’d even tried to masturbate over him) but it was never going to happen. You liked who you liked. ‘One day though, eh?’ He cleared his throat. ‘Can I ask you something? And I want you to answer honestly.’
‘Of course.’
‘If our situations had been reversed and Henry had caught me and tried to blackmail me, and we were here now, as we are, would you have gloated?’
She looked at him. ‘Oh, yes. Unequivocally. Viciously.’
‘Well. I want you to take note of the fact that I am not gloating. That’s all. I’m not trying to congratulate myself or get one over on you. I just want you to take note.’
She nodded, warily.
‘I suppose this is my way of saying … well, what I’m trying to say …’ He started to fiddle with his earlobe. Just three words. Damnit. ‘I’m trying to make up for past misdeeds.’ He grinned. His face felt like a stupid clacking skull. Now it was her turn. It shouldn’t be this way, but here they were.
She squirmed. Oh God, why were they like this with each other? What was wrong with them? ‘I wish I was drunk,’ she said. And so – it was coming. He was sorry but unable to say it, and she was also sorry and she probably wouldn’t be able to say it either, but just something – give me something.
But then a siren went off in the near distance and they both hopped to their feet.
‘It’s just the lunchtime bell at the factory,’ he said, pressing a hand to his chest. ‘Jesus, that gave me a— Phew.’ He dropped his cigarette in the mud. ‘Shall we attend to the issue at hand?’
They collided as they re-joined the path.
‘Sorry,’ they said at the same time.
They glanced at each other.
Maybe that would count? Couldn’t they just let that be it, and have done with it?
They crouched down by Henry.
‘Can you smell that?’ said Bettina, scrunching up her face.
‘Oh, look at that,’ said Bart, seeing a bulge at the back of the man’s trousers. ‘He’s shat himself.’
‘Oh dear.’ That black humour in her eyes. ‘He’s not going to like that, is he?’
‘He’s going to be very cross.’
‘He should’ve thought about that before he got his disgusting old willy out,’ she said. ‘Shall we flip him onto his back?’
They put their hands on Henry. He was cold. And of course, he would be – he’d been lying in a shaded puddle of mud. Of course he was cold.
‘Towards me,’ Bart said. ‘One, two, three.’
Over he flipped. His back landed in the sludge with a wet smack and little droplets of mud splattered up. The whole front of his body was caked in black mud and little twigs. A coiled worm stuck to his shirt.
‘Oh my God,’ whispered Bettina.
Henry’s eyes had rolled up so only the whites were showing, but they weren’t fully white, not any more – the left one had a red bloom on it, like a poppy petal, from where his blood vessels had burst. He had brown sick coming out of his nose – it’d dribbled out onto the sock and mixed in with the mud – brown sick, black mud. His skin had a grey-purple hue in places, except for his face, which was the colour of frogspawn. He was unmistakeably dead. Bart reached out with a tentative hand and pulled the sock out of Henry’s mouth. Backed-up vomit poured out. A brown, lumpy porridge.
Bettina jumped up and lurched away, groaning. Bart fell back on his haunches and looked up at the sky through the trees. He could see everything with great clarity – the pale pear-green of some leaves jostling with the deep toad-green of others, the little knotty nubs sticking out of the uppermost branches, a gasp of milky blue sky.
‘How the hell have you got so good at that?’ he asked, watching as she brought her boot down on the upper blade of the shovel.
‘Because I’m always bloody digging,’ she said.
They were in a small clearing – a patch, really – some hundred yards or so into the thick and off the path. Brambles and bushes enclosed them all around. They’d looked for the gun before digging. Hadn’t found it.
‘Sometimes, for the big jobs, we get the Italian POWs to help. But most of the time, it’s just us.’ She paused and held out her right hand. ‘See that there? I’ve developed a callus.’
They were down to their vests and trousers. Bart had on a pair of wellingtons now, retrieved from the garden shed. He’d also brought the shovels, rope and a large spool of sackcloth.
‘So. Why a land girl?’
‘Oh, God,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘Don’t ask.’
‘Come on. Tell me.’
‘You’ll laugh.’
‘So?’
‘OK. It was because of the poster.’
‘What poster?’
‘That one they put up bloody everywhere. With the gorgeous woman in the green jumper? Holding the pitchfork? “For a healthy, happy job.” I imagined myself in her place. I had all these romantic ideas in my head. Fresh air, real work.’
‘For King and country?’ said Bart.
‘Oh, you know I don’t care about the King. Country, yes, but not the King. I wanted to not be me any more. At least that’s what I tell people who ask.’ She paused in her digging. ‘You know me well, husband. You know my motives better than anyone. I’ll give you one guess. You tell me why that poster so appealed to me.’
‘You fancied the girl.’
‘No. Well, yes. But there’s another reason.’
‘You wanted to be the girl.’
She made her hand turn in lazy circles. ‘Because …’
‘Because she was thin.’
‘Jackpot.’
He laughed. ‘You joined the Women’s Land Army to get thin?’
‘Subconsciously, yes.’
‘Well, it worked.’
She nodded. ‘And I love the work. So goody gumdrops.’
‘What do you do exactly, on the farm?’
She unloaded a shovelful of earth, her knees carefully bent. ‘I kill rats.’
He stopped. ‘You kill rats?’
She nodded. ‘I’m part of the anti-vermin squad. We kill rats and moles and the like.’
‘You’re a rat-catcher?’
She sighed. ‘Yes, it’s funny. I know it’s funny.’ She continued to dig. Sweat was darkening her white vest.
‘Can you remember the last time we were together?’ he said. ‘I mean in a friendly capacity.’
She shook her head.
‘I do,’ he said. ‘It was when the children came here to stay with our mothers for a week.1937, I think. We played Scrabble and I kept making rude words. Do you remember?’
‘I do now, actually.’
‘I even remember what the words were. “Teats” was one. “Scrotum” was another.’
‘“Quim”,’ she said. ‘I remember quim. We debated the spelling.’
He dislodged a fist-sized rock and tossed it away. A family of worms writhed around in the gap left by it. ‘I don’t think I ever grew up,’ he said.
‘I don’t think I did either,’ she said. ‘Not until the war.’
‘Yes. Imminent death and destruction has a way of ageing one.’
She was quiet for a while. And then she said, in a tear-scratched voice, ‘I wonder what – I wonder what murder will make of me.’ She rested her elbow on the spade handle, dropped her face into the crook of her arm and cried.
He watched her, wincing painfully. Were they allowed to show kindness to each other now? Had the old contract been torn up? ‘There, there,’ he said, reaching across and patting her shoulder. ‘I wouldn’t call it murder. You only meant to restrain him.’
‘Then what was I doing, running to fetch a gun?’ She sniffed and abruptly pulled the spade out of the earth.
‘Here’s one consoling thought,’ he said. ‘You’re in good company.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, look at this war. Men killing each other left, right and centre. Thousands of them. You might think that because it’s a war, it’s different, that the deaths don’t count. But they do. I’ve spoken to countless soldiers about this, and believe me, none of them are untainted by the killing. That’s why so many of them hit the bottle when they come home. They’ve killed human men. It takes its toll on the soul, you see. Remember what Jonathan was like? That wasn’t just nerves! He’d had to kill people, he’d had to stab them in the guts with a bayonet and watch the life leak out of them.’
Bettina was resting her arm on the shovel, listening to him.
‘What I’m saying is – rather clumsily I’m sure – is that what you’re feeling right now is shared by thousands of men in the free world. Only you didn’t kill a brainwashed man who was only following orders. You killed a rat, a big fat juicy rat, come to nibble on your crops – that’s what you’re good at, that’s what you do! And frankly, darling, I would’ve done the same. You asked me earlier what I would’ve done? Well, there’s your answer.’
‘Really?’ Both hopeful and cynical.
‘Really.’ There was a rustling in the undergrowth to their left and they stopped, gasping. A bird flew out, and then another. They were finches, mud-brown and darting. Not quite doves, but better than nothing.
They wrapped the body with sackcloth and tied it with rope at ten-inch intervals, like string around a joint of ham. They rolled it into the trench and then rested a while, smoking. Bettina wanted to say a prayer. Bart started to respond to this and she held up a hand, silencing him. ‘Just let me be a hypocrite for once, will you?’
She recited the Lord’s Prayer, faltering over some lines. ‘Do you want to add anything?’ she said.
‘Um, I suppose,’ he said, sitting straighter, ‘that Henry was a loyal servant and a diligent worker …? May he rest in peace? I hope he doesn’t go to hell, but if he does, we shall probably meet him there ourselves.’
‘Bartholomew!’
‘I don’t know what else to say!’
‘Well, perhaps we ought to leave it at that.’ She nodded – one firm and final nod. ‘Amen.’
‘Amen,’ he said.
She sat down next to him and they smoked in silence, their hips touching, just.