Chapter Five

 

A Car and a House

 

He had told Coverdale nothing but the truth. As he sat in the house every evening, eating a meal which he bought from the deep freeze at the grocer, and switching the television set on and off in the hope of finding a programme to interest him, he felt Clare’s presence pervading the rooms as tangibly as a scent. He was not burdened by guilt about the act, which seemed something remote and belonging to another person, nor did he feel any sense of triumph that things had gone as he intended. It was rather as if Clare was not dead at all but might walk through the front door at any moment, criticise the changes he had made in the house and demand that everything be put back in its proper place. He had moved the television set to a part of the room where it was possible to sit and watch in comfort, but he knew that she would be annoyed because it made all the furniture look unbalanced. He hung up some curtains that Clare had discarded because she thought them too bright, but they gave him little pleasure. There were some things that he enjoyed doing himself, like paying the milkman, and there was the daily pleasure of shopping, but even about such things there was something disconcerting, because he was constantly reminded that he was shopping not for two but for one. After buying a chop one day he remembered that Clare did not like chops, and felt irritation because she would not be there to see his gesture of independence. He was irritated also by Susan’s complaisance, which had pleased him so much at first. Why was she so unctuously friendly, why could she not behave more as she had done when Clare was alive? He contemplated getting rid of her, but found himself unable to make the effort.

He spent the whole of one evening up in the attic, dismantling the slot racing track with the intention of bringing it down and setting it up in the dining-room, which he hardly ever used. After all, he could do what he liked, he could even knock two rooms into one to accommodate the track if he wished. But he found that he no longer had any interest in slot racing, and never put up the track again. He advertised and sold the whole thing through a local paper.

He found himself unwilling to leave the house for any length of time. He was not afraid that something might be discovered in his absence, for there was nothing to discover, but each time he opened the front door he had a feeling that something terrible might have happened. This sensation became so strong that he was increasingly reluctant to go out in the evening. There was no lack of invitations, from the Paynes, the Elsoms and others, but he refused them with transparently untruthful excuses. Nor did he go up to London. Easonby Mellon’s clothes were in the Left Luggage office still, together with the diary, and he knew that he must do something about them, but he stayed at The Laurels.

One evening Payne came round, bringing with him some papers for signature. He accepted a glass of sherry.

‘Nice bright curtains. You’ve made some improvements.’ He peered at Arthur as if he were an object at the end of a microscope. ‘How are you keeping, old chap? Sorry you haven’t been able to manage an evening for bridge.’

‘I’ve been busy. And you need a couple.’

‘Nonsense,’ Payne said heartily, although it was obviously true. ‘You’re looking a bit peaky.’

‘I’m all right.’

‘Partly the weather, I dare say. It’s a funny old summer all right,’ the bank manager said judicially, although it had been very much like all the summers Arthur could remember. ‘You want to get away. And you’re a lucky fellow, you can do it.’

This was a day or two after Coverdale’s visit, and the words seemed to harden the resolution in Arthur’s mind. ‘I thought of selling the house.’

‘I quite understand. Though of course we shall be sorry to lose you. Where did you think of going?’

Nothing so tangible as a particular place had been in his mind, and it was with surprise that he heard his reply. ‘A little place by the coast. Somewhere near Brighton.’

From the moment of speech he knew that this was what he wanted. It was as though a gate had been opened by the words, and after Payne had gone he brought down from the attic the other watercolours and sat in a chair looking at them. The memories they evoked filled the room. His mother’s sprawling hand had given them titles: ‘Devil’s Dyke in Summer,’ ‘West Blatchington, the Mill,’ ‘Penn’s House and Cottage, Steyning,’ and so on. The longer he looked at them the more attractive they seemed. They were very different from Clare’s pictures, in which great blocks of vivid colour filled the canvas, barely recognisable as tables and chairs. What nonsense Miss Leppard had talked about Clare showing talent – his mother’s watercolours seemed to him ten times more interesting. When his mother painted she had worn always a large floppy hat which kept away the intense sunlight. He had asked her once whether she could see clearly enough, and she had laughed and said coquettishly, ‘Even a lady painter has to look after her complexion, darling.’ It was true that she had a complexion of beautiful pallor with just the faintest hint of colour in it – or had the colour, now that he came to think of it, been added by art?

They had lived at Brighton for only twelve months, after she separated from his father, but in retrospect the time seemed to have been much longer. In his recollection that had not been a funny old summer, but one in which day after day had been hot with a sky of endless blue. He did not know until years later that his father had gone off to live with the other woman whom he eventually married, only that there were no more quarrels every evening, and that he must not mention his father’s name. ‘You’re all I have now,’ his mother said to him. ‘We shall never be parted, shall we, darling?’ Every day they had taken a picnic somewhere on the downs and there, on a green breast of hill, she sat and dabbed paint on to cartridge paper while he read historical tales and funny stories, or rolled on the grass.

He remembered vividly being at the top of a hill, calling to her to watch and then rolling down, over and over until he came to rest at the bottom. He saw that blood was running down one of his knees and began to cry. He looked up then to the top of the hill, an immense distance, and saw her against the skyline, arms spread out like a bird’s wings, and then descending to him with little musical cries of alarm. They went almost always to the downs, because his mother said that Brighton itself was vulgar. Sometimes they caught a bus and had tea at Steyning in a little low-ceilinged cottage where he always drank milk with soda water, which she said was good for him. Was it possible that this period in his life had lasted for only a few months? He had never returned to that part of Sussex, but looking at the watercolours with their patches of green, gold and blue, he knew that this was where he wished to live.

Later that evening he contemplated his own naked figure in the full-length bedroom mirror, the spindly legs and sloping shoulders, the beginnings of a paunch, and below the paunch the thin fuzz and the small useless-looking penis. He examined closely the egg head with its small sorrowful eyes like raisins, and the poached egg pouches beneath them. ‘Not much of a body,’ he said aloud, and it occurred to him that it was the same body with which Easonby Mellon had been so successful. That too seemed a long time ago, everything before the act was a long time ago.

For a few days after the act he had felt an intense urge to recommence writing his diary, and suffered the sense of deprivation that a smoker feels on giving up cigarettes. He actually bought a notebook and sat down to write in it, but the words refused to flow as they had done in the past. After a couple of days in which he found almost nothing to say, he tore out the sheets on which he had written and burned them. This gesture seemed to have a symbolic value. After it he was better able to accept that he had entered a world in which the pressures and pleasures of the past no longer existed. He did not want the things that Easonby Mellon had taken so greedily, nor was he the Arthur Brownjohn who had been married to Clare. The act had in some mysterious way set him free to begin a new life. He felt himself able to go to London.

He went to the Lektreks’ office in Romany House and found there a few orders and several sharp letters from his American suppliers asking why they had not heard from him. In a burst of energy he typed twenty letters in a day, informing suppliers and customers that because of family troubles Lektreks was closing down. Then he invited Elsom to lunch and told him the news.

‘But you can’t do that.’ Elsom was amazed and indignant.

‘Why not?’

‘I told you, GBD are interested. You’re throwing away money.’

Although the problems of the past were remote he recognised that they existed, and that it would be foolish to let GBD see the Lektreks books. He said curtly that the closing down of Lektreks was his affair.

‘Of course it is.’ Elsom spat out bits of food in his earnestness. ‘But I’m speaking as a friend, Arthur, you understand. You can’t do anything but lose by this.’

‘It’s what Clare would have wished,’ he said piously, and added with more truth, ‘It’s for my own peace of mind.’ The meal was concluded in gloomy silence.

There remained the question of Easonby Mellon’s relics and the diary. They could not be left indefinitely at Waterloo Station, but he had not faced up to the problem of their disposal. When he had collected them, where were they to be buried or burned? It struck him suddenly that he must buy not only a house but a car. If he possessed a car, the disposition of Mellon’s belongings would be simplicity itself.

No sooner had the idea occurred to him than the purchase of a car seemed a matter of urgency. He had learned to drive in the army during the war, but he took a few lessons and surprised his instructor by his aptitude and the quickness of his reactions. There was little point in having a car until he had passed the driving test, but he was unable to deny himself the pleasure of spending money. He did not buy a new car because part of the pleasure lay in bargaining about the price, and after visiting half a dozen dealers and trying out twice that number of cars he bought a two-year-old Triumph, guaranteed by the dealer to have had only one owner and to be in splendid condition. The car was driven back to The Laurels and put into the garage, which had been cleared to receive it. He waited eagerly for the day when he would take the test.

In the meantime he was engaged in selling The Laurels and buying a house on the Sussex downs. He slightly scandalised Jaggard, the estate agent, who hinted delicately that the recent tragedy might affect the price, by asking what would be a reasonable figure and then naming a sum two hundred and fifty pounds below it. The Laurels was bought by a civil servant who had a wife and family, and the sale was completed in August. Arthur had, however, already moved out. There was a sale of effects, a symbolic severance of the bonds that linked him to Clare. He included all of their household belongings in this sale, even things that would obviously be needed in his new home like kitchen utensils and the lawn mower. He did not attend the sale, but was pleased to see that the picture of Mr Slattery had fetched only three pounds, the cost of the frame.

He said as few goodbyes as possible. What, after all, linked him to Fraycut now that life with Clare was over? The Paynes, the Elsoms, one or two others, said how sorry they were to see him go, but he did not feel that they were in any way his friends. Perhaps it was a good thing that Arthur Brownjohn, starting a new life, should have no friends. He gave Susan a cheque for a hundred pounds, saying that Clare would have wished her to have it, and was embarrassed by a flood of tears. He had a slightly disturbing encounter when he was almost knocked down while crossing a street one day by a car which swung without warning out of a side road.

The driver poked his head out of the window and shouted at him. ‘You want to bloody well look where you’re going.’ It was Doctor Hubble. He got out of the car and stood swaying slightly. ‘Oh, it’s you. How are you? Hear you’re clearing out.’

Arthur agreed, although they were not the words he would have chosen.

‘Don’t blame you. Shouldn’t want to stay myself in the circumstances.’ What did he mean by that? ‘Still haven’t got the chap who did it?’

‘No.’

Hubble stood glaring at him, and Arthur felt a twinge of uneasiness. How could he ever have tried deliberately to deceive a man who resembled more than anything else a dangerous wild animal? Then the doctor stuck out his hand, said ‘She was a damned fine woman,’ got back into the car and drove away.

Before he left he went to see Coverdale. The Inspector’s reception of him was friendly but gloomy. There was no news of Mellon.

‘We’ve found somebody who saw him on the platform. Carrying a blue suitcase.’ A shiver went through Arthur’s frame. This was the suitcase in the Left Luggage office. If the police ever thought of searching there…but why should they do any such thing? Coverdale was still talking. ‘…up in London I guess, hiding out. A crook like Mellon knows plenty of places. But we’ll find him.’

‘You don’t think he’s gone abroad.’

‘I don’t. One thing, far as we can tell he’s got no passport. No, he’s hiding out. Trouble is, we don’t know who his friends are. Can’t find out how he got to know your wife either.’

Arthur shook his head to show that he also could not imagine how this had come about. Then he said with careful slowness, ‘You’ve questioned his own wife again, I suppose?’

Coverdale stared at him. The shiny lumps on his face were more than usually apparent. ‘You hadn’t heard?’

‘Heard what?’

‘She’s dead. Put her head in the gas oven.’

On the wall behind the Inspector there was a photograph of police sports, with a man doing the pole vault, twisting over the bar. Arthur stared at this photograph.

‘Can’t think what made her do it. Wish I had talked to her again, got to the bottom of all that rubbish about Mellon being an agent.’

‘When did it happen?’

‘Fortnight ago. It was in the papers. She left the usual note, can’t go on, that kind of thing.’

A secretary came in with letters to be signed. Coverdale said, ‘We’ll keep in touch. Don’t worry. The usual channels work slowly sometimes, but everything comes through them in the end.’

After leaving the station he walked to a small public garden and sat down on one of the green wooden benches surrounding a dry fountain topped by a mournful bronze bust. Below the bust it said: ‘These gardens are the gift of Ezekiel Jones, citizen of this borough, educator and philanthropist.’

He knew that he should feel sorrow and remorse, but in fact he felt nothing. What had she said to him on that last evening? Can’t live without you, I shall kill myself, something like that. People really do kill themselves, this is something that happens, he thought. He tried to remember what Joan looked like, but was unable to bring her face before his eyes. He seemed insulated from emotion, as though some fibrous barrier had been interposed between his feelings and what went on in the world.

An old man sat down on the bench, produced a bag of bread from his pocket and began to break the bread and throw bits to the pigeons clustering round him. One of the pieces fell beside Arthur’s foot. He picked it up and threw it to a bird that seemed weaker than the rest. The pigeon looked at the bread, pecked at it ineffectually, then moved away. None of the other pigeons came near it.

He found a house soon after he moved into a Brighton hotel and began to look for one. He found the house quickly because he knew what he wanted. The area between Devil’s Dyke and Brighton, which he remembered with pleasure, proved distressingly urbanised and unattractive. Perhaps the beauty of it had been invented by him and it had always been like this, for he learned with surprise that a railway had run to the Dyke before the war. The triangle to the east of this area, however, topped by Ditchling Beacon, with its small villages and relics of ancient earthworks, fascinated him. He knew from the map that this was not where he had come in childhood, yet it seemed to him that he recognised landmarks, the Iron Age fort of Hollingbury, Plumpton Plain, and the black and white windmills known as Jack and Jill. It was here, near to the road running from Ditchling to Brighton, that he bought a small bungalow, surprising another estate agent by his acceptance of the price asked for it. The bungalow had been built in the nineteen thirties, of ochre brick now weathered to neutral brown. It had a square living-room with French windows, two bedrooms of which one was minute, a surprisingly large kitchen with a good deal of electrical equipment in it, and a bathroom with green tiles on the wall and mustard coloured plastic tiles on the floor. Geese flew on the living-room walls. It was not pretty, but nothing could have been less like The Laurels, and the setting was delightful, sheltered in a small cleft between hills. Outside there was a garage and a quarter of an acre of wilderness which had once been a garden. He was able to move in before the end of August, and he drove the Triumph into the garage himself, for a week before the move he passed his driving test.

Almost the first thing he did was to put up his mother’s watercolours in the sitting-room. For some reason he did not take down the flying geese. Did he leave them because, like the watercolours, they would have offended Clare? Had he bought the bungalow because it was what she would have described as a potty little place? He could not be sure, but in any case this was a line of thought that he did not care to pursue. The furniture came from a Brighton store. It was all new and mostly finished in light woods, polished pine and afromosia. On the afternoon that he moved in, there was a knock on the door. He opened it to find a diminutive couple standing there smiling at him.

‘Mr Brownjohn?’ The little man took off a check cap and presented a card. ‘George Brodzky.’

‘And I’m Mary,’ the little woman chirped. ‘We’re your neighbours.’

‘Neighbours?’

‘Over the hill. From Dunroamin. You must have passed it. So amusing, English names, are they not?’

That was George. Mary chimed in. ‘And we thought as you were moving in – I mean, we know what it’s like – you would come to tea.’

‘Come to tea!’ The note of horror in his voice escaped them.

‘Tea is on the hob.’ Little George rubbed his hands.

‘You’re very kind but–’

‘I won’t take no for an answer,’ said little Mary. ‘I’ve made some buns, and although I say it myself my buns are good. And you’ll find the men get on much better without you, isn’t that right?’ She called this out to the foreman, who agreed enthusiastically. Arthur had been altogether too fussy about occasional bumps and splinterings.

‘Her buns are the tops,’ said George.

He went to tea with the dismal knowledge that he would regret it. The Brodzkys lived over the brow of the hill, five minutes’ walk away, in a bigger version of his bungalow. Brodzky was a Jewish tailor who had come over as a refugee from the Nazis, and had evidently done rather well. Sufficiently well, at least, to retire and buy the bungalow which had been named Dunroamin in what Mary told George was the English tradition. It was not about themselves that they wanted to talk, however, but about their new neighbour. They knew he was alone, but what had happened to his wife? Arthur said she had died recently, and did not expand on it. He did not need to, however, for Mary Brodzky read about every case of criminal violence in the newspaper.

‘Not the Mr Brownjohn?’ She saw from Arthur’s hesitancy that he was. ‘George, Mr Brownjohn’s wife was – this was the case that – you know, you read about it –’

‘The lady who was murdered?’ Little George rubbed his hands together.

She lowered her voice respectfully at mention of the tabooed word. ‘Such a terrible thing, and they still haven’t got the man, have they?’

No doubt the manner of Clare’s death would have become known quickly in any case, but he felt that acceptance of the invitation had been disastrous. When he went into the local general shop or into the nearby pub, conversation ceased for a moment before being abruptly resumed, and he saw people looking at him with sidelong expectancy. Mary Brodzky twice telephoned him with invitations to meet people, both of which he refused, and one day she called to ask if she could do any shopping for him in Brighton. He replied politely that he was driving in himself. On the following day George called. It was raining.

‘We have here in the village our society for amateur dramatics. I am to ask if you would like to join.’ His smile was wide.

‘No, thank you.’

‘It is very amusing. Perhaps if I should explain it –’

Brodzky was not wearing a coat. Rain spotted his shoulders. It was outrageously rude not to ask him in. ‘Go away,’ Arthur said.

Brodzky was dumbfounded. ‘I beg your pardon?’

He was dismayed to hear his voice rising to an undignified squeak. ‘I don’t let nosy parkers into my house.’ He stepped back and slammed the door. After that there were no further invitations from the Brodzkys, and they did not acknowledge each other in the street.

That was really the end of his relations with the village. In the shop he was greeted politely but without warmth, and he stopped going to the pub. The milkman said good day to him and the butcher delivered three times a week. The vicar called once, but lost interest when he learned that his new parishioner did not go to church. The Brodzkys had offered to try to find a woman who would come in and do for him, but their relations had been severed soon afterwards and he felt reluctant to allow anybody to intrude on his affairs, asking personal questions and poking about among his things. The bungalow was small, and it was quite easy to clean it himself without the nosy assistance of some Sussex Susan. He had escaped from them all, Susans, Elsoms, Paynes and the rest. He was, as he had often wished to be, alone.

He found sufficient occupation inside and outside the house. He bought a multi-purpose electric tool with which he sanded and polished the floors of both living-room and bedrooms, repainted them, built some bookshelves and also a cupboard for the living-room. The making and fitting of this cupboard, which was made of a polished wood named sangrosa, gave him great emotional satisfaction, and he put a small compartment inside it, with its own separate doors. The latch on these inner doors did not fit perfectly and had a tendency to come open, but still he was delighted by his own skill. The garden also took up a good deal of time. What could be done with a quarter of an acre? He bought half a dozen books on gardening and cut out articles that appeared in the papers. He would have liked to see things flowering immediately, but it proved that September was not a good time for planting. However, there were things that could be done. He reduced the wilderness of the lawn with a scythe, mowed it, and then spiked the mossy weedy surface with an aerator. Every day for a week he carried out destructive operations, pulling up weeds and nettles and burning them in a new kind of incinerator which he bought. Sodium chlorate extinguished weeds on the paths. There was broken fencing at the back of the house which he mended with new palings and wire. He worked every morning and afternoon, eating a quick lunch of bread and cheese with an urgency he could not have explained even to himself. In the evening he cooked something, often out of a tin, and settled down to read the papers and watch television. The news seemed unreal to him, the capers on the screen even more insignificant, and watching them he often fell asleep.

One day he took the train to London, went across to Waterloo Station, collected the blue suitcase and came straight back again. In spite of his advance trepidation he felt no flicker of fear when he handed over the ticket and was given the suitcase. He would have been quite prepared to meet Coverdale at the station. Easonby Mellon had had a blue suitcase, he was carrying one too. What was strange about that? He was strong in the assurance of success. He would not have been so boastful as to call what he had done perfect, for he recognised that he had been helped by one or two fortuitous circumstances like Mr Lillicrapp’s sight of Easonby Mellon leaving The Laurels, but still he was satisfied.

He deliberately delayed opening the suitcase until the evening, leaving it to be savoured like a favourite sweet. As a further congratulatory gesture, a measure of Brownjohn’s confidence in Brownjohn, he opened the sangrosan cupboard, considered the bottles which had been lined up there – gin, whisky, vodka – and opened the whisky. Gobble gobble, went the liquid in the glass, giving him a delicious feeling, not unlike that felt by Easonby Mellon when having a bit of nonsense. A zizz of soda and there it was, ready for drinking. He drank. Then he took the little key from his ring and turned it in the lock of the suitcase. Was everything there? He checked, hugging himself.

 

Item. One suit in loud gingery tweed, jacket and trousers only, in good condition.

Item. Tie decorated with small coloured horseshoes, sporty shirt and ditto socks.

Item. One fine head of glossy red-brown hair, one small beard of slightly different colour. One small bottle of spirit gum.

Item. One pair of contact lenses in small box.

Item. One diary in black cover.

 

The rest of Easonby Mellon’s clothes, together with two of his wigs, had been incinerated at Clapham. He stroked the crisp hair.

‘Safely home,’ he said aloud. ‘Safely home, my beauties.’ He drained the whisky and poured another, then opened the diary and sat down to read, absorbed by the account of problems that had loomed so large in the past and now looked trivial. All the fear he had expressed about Hubble, for instance, and his feeling that the doctor had been suspicious. Obviously what he had taken for suspicion was natural drunken rudeness, the ‘terrible glare’ he had noted was annoyance at being called so late at night. At the same time he was pleased that he had given up the zincalium scheme, which as he saw now had been clumsily conceived. When he came to the passages about Clapham the past flooded back unpleasantly. To stop himself from reading further he took out the sheets, tore them up into small pieces, and put them into a cardboard box. Tomorrow would be D-Day, D for Destruction. His glass was empty, and he poured another drink. He took off his jacket and trousers, put on the tweed suit, clapped the wig to his head without bothering to use the fixative. Easonby Mellon walked again!

Not quite, however, not really as he should be. He used the spirit gum to fix the beard and put in the contact lenses, which were more trouble than they should have been because his hand was shaking slightly. ‘Not a bad little bachelor establishment you’ve got here, Brownjohn,’ he said. ‘You don’t mind if I look around?’ He strutted into kitchen and bedroom commenting loudly on them, bouncing up and down on the bed. He went to the front door, opened it with a little difficulty and staggered slightly as he walked out to the garden, looked up at the green swell of hill.

‘Nestling under the down,’ he said. ‘Very nice, though it’s nicer to nestle between the sheets.’ It was twilight, and the air was filled with the sweet scent of early evening. He sniffed this air, opened his mouth and drank up the air in great gulps, staring at the green hill. A tickling sensation at the back of his neck made him turn.

The Brodzkys stood beside the gate, arm in arm, staring at him. The little man with his check cap, the little woman gazing eager-eyed – for a few seconds they stared at him and he stared back at them. Then the Brodzkys, still with arms linked like some four-legged creature, scuttled away up the road to their bungalow, and he returned to the house. He stared at himself in the bedroom glass. He seemed to have shrunk within the clothes, which hung on him with curious looseness – could he have lost weight? With furtive speed he took them off, together with the wig and moustache, and slipped out the contact lenses. Safely back in Arthur Brownjohn’s nondescript old flannel trousers he recorked the whisky bottle and returned it to the cupboard. The latch came open and he closed it with a thump. The genie who had come out of the bottle lacked his old magical power.

On the following morning he put a barrowful of weeds into the incinerator, stuffed the suit on top of them together with the box containing the torn-up diary, and added the beard. He broke up the contact lenses with a hammer and added them to the pile, and did the same thing with the bottle of spirit gum. Then he put on more weeds and set fire to the lot. Blue smoke swirled upwards. He placed the top on the incinerator and left the past to burn. At the last moment he found himself unable to dispose of the wig. As he stroked the crisp reality of the hair tears came to his eyes. He put it carefully into the inner compartment of the cupboard, promising himself that he would destroy it very soon. At midday he lifted the incinerator lid and stared at the contents that were reduced to satisfying but saddening ash.

Although so much of the past had gone his mother’s watercolour scenes remained. He took down the little pictures from the walls, put them into the car, and drove out over the downs. During the afternoon he revisited the scene of each picture, and found them all changed. ‘West Blatchington, the Mill’ had been shown as an idyllic rural scene, but it stood now among a spate of suburban building. ‘The Downs at Peacehaven’ bore no resemblance to the hills dotted with a pretty house or two shown in her mild greens and blues. Instead, a great mess of brick sprawled over the whole area like some terrible red growth. Not one of the scenes was as she had shown it. He knew that this was to be expected, yet it troubled him. The country today belonged to the new housing complexes and the petrol pump. The world of his childhood, the world his mother painted, had been destroyed. Back in the bungalow he pored over the watercolours as though they could provide an answer to the problems of his life, and realised what was wrong. According to a book he had read about Sussex the picture of the Devil’s Dyke should have shown a railway where she depicted a green wash of down. She had left out the railway because it would have spoiled the picture. Were the other paintings equally remote from reality? When he looked up other books he found that Peacehaven in the early nineteen twenties could not possibly have looked as she had shown it, and it seemed to him that this doubt about the veracity of the pictures must extend to the whole of his childhood life. Had it ever really existed as he remembered it? His mother had died of what was then called heart disease when he was twenty-one. How much did he really know about her? Did this image of a woman in a floppy hat, this indulgent mother trying to preserve him from the harshness of the world, correspond with the truth? How deep had been her disappointment when it became clear that he was not bright enough to get a University scholarship and would have to take a job when he left grammar school? What had she felt during the last years in the little flat at Swiss Cottage where she died? It was not until the funeral that he had seen his father again, and then he wondered how he had ever felt the fear he was now able to acknowledge of this outspoken but meticulously neat and dapper man. They found little to say to each other, but they met two or three times a year, conversing with the politeness of strangers. His father had written a letter of sympathy after Clare’s death which remained unanswered.

These events were clouded in his mind, he had always refused to discuss them with himself, and it seemed to him that the rest of his life must consist of such an unending discussion. He could remember nothing at all of the years before his mother’s death when he had left school and gone to work at the insurance office in which he had stayed until his call-up. Had he come home each evening to a cooked meal, did they ever go out together? He could remember nothing except the three heart attacks she had suffered in the months before she died, the rest was the woman in the floppy hat on the downs painting her untrue pictures. He had shown the pictures to Clare just after their marriage, and a little later she had begun to attend art classes. Was it possible that his feelings about his mother had affected his relationship with Clare?

He hung up the pictures again, ate a tin of food and went to bed. He lay sleepless until four in the morning. Around him in the darkness stretched the barren land of freedom.